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Donald Winnicott, a British pediatrician and child psychoanalyst who wrote extensively and compassionately about the relationships between mothers and their infants, is best known among a general readership for coining the expression “the good-enough mother.” Winnicott started using the term to distinguish his observations from the theories of Melanie Klein, whose work held great sway among analysts in the mid-century. Klein had conceptualized a distinction between the “good breast” and the “bad breast” as a way of understanding the drama of an infant’s early experiences of omnipotence and frustration. In a letter to a colleague, from 1952, Winnicott noted that Klein was describing objects within the infant’s psyche; he himself, however, was concerned with real women and real babies. “I always talk about ‘the good-enough mother’ or ‘the not-good-enough mother,’ because in point of fact we are talking about the actual woman, we know that the best she can do is to be good enough,” Winnicott explained.

Within Winnicott’s framework, the good-enough mother is one who, initially acceding entirely to a newborn’s demands, intuits how, over time, she might incrementally hold back from offering immediate gratification, thereby facilitating the necessary development of her child’s sense of self as a separate individual. In his writing for nonspecialists, and for new mothers in particular, Winnicott emphasized that, in most instances, a mother’s attunement to what her baby needs arises naturally, without the intervention or instruction of experts. “In the ordinary things you do you are quite naturally doing very important things, and the beauty of it is that you do not have to be clever, and you do not even have to think if you do not want to,” Winnicott wrote in “The Child, the Family, and the Outside World,” a book aimed at new mothers, first published in 1964. He added, “If you love your baby he or she is getting a good start.”

The maternal landscape has changed substantially since Winnicott wrote those reassuring words. They were addressed to a mother about whom certain social assumptions were made: that there was a breadwinning partner to enable her absence from the workplace throughout the child’s early years, and that her extra- maternal pursuits, if she had them, could be cheerfully put on hold for the duration. In the subsequent decades, the available maternal models have evolved, in often contradictory ways—partly as a result of women’s revised ambitions for themselves, and partly as a result of economic changes that have put financially secure stay-at-home motherhood largely out of reach, even for those who might want it.

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If you were born into the Winnicottian paradigm of maternal attunement, you grew up witnessing the fraught emergence of the so-called supermom, that creature of the nineteen-eighties and nineties, who transferred her professional skill set to the project of raising an infant, with controlled inputs (organic baby food, ambient classical music, a nanny who speaks a useful second language) offering the promise of desired outputs (high SAT scores leading to socioeconomic success). If you became a mother around the turn of the century, you had the internet in general—and UrbanBaby or Mumsnet in particular—as a bleak site of anonymous commiseration about new motherhood, with its sleepless nights, its clueless, hapless spouses, and its often divisive choices, in which moral and consumer judgment of the behavior of others went hand in hand. Breast or bottle? Maclaren or Bugaboo? The debates, and the vitriol, were endless.

With the ascent of social media in the past two decades, new mothers have been confronted by sleeker, shinier paradigms with which to compare themselves unfavorably. There is the Pinterest mom, forever crafting or beading amid a gaggle of contentedly analog kindergartners, or the more recent trad wife, whose performance of ostentatiously elective stay-at-home motherhood incites both reflexive disdain (How can she bear to do just that?) and aggrieved envy (How can she afford to do all that?). With the arrival of COVID-19, in 2020, the pressures of new motherhood grew more intense still: cooped up at home with needy children on their laps and demanding bosses on their laptops, pandemic moms discovered not only that they couldn’t have it all but also that they definitely couldn’t do it all. New motherhood is always a maelstrom, but the new new motherhood, it has lately been suggested, has become a tempest of a different, close-to-unbearable order. How to be a good mother, or a good-enough mother, under contemporary conditions? If the mother loves her baby, the infant is getting a good start. But how the hell is the mother doing?

Until very recently in the history of humankind, there was one defining injunction that characterized good mothering: Don’t die. Throughout “A Woman’s Work: Reclaiming the Radical History of Mothering” (Dutton), the British historian Elinor Cleghorn offers a reminder of the hazards of childbirth and the postpartum period through the ages, easily forgotten in an era of prenatal monitoring and sanitary obstetric protocols. Her book begins with a consideration of birth practices among women from the Minoan civilization—Bronze Age inhabitants of the island of Crete, whose deities included a goddess of childbirth. Cleghorn writes speculatively and somewhat romantically of a culture in which women giving birth were sustained by ecstatic rites and practices conducted within the sacred protection of caves. “This was a time when the connection between mothering and the natural world was celebrated, when the openings of the earth offered spaces for maternal reverence, when ritual practices were devoted to mothers’ experiences,” she writes. The salvific intercessions of a goddess would have been needed. Cleghorn notes that many Minoan women died between the ages of twenty and twenty-five, indicating that childbearing was most likely the cause of death.

For millennia, giving birth was the way in which a lot of women died. A Roman funerary epitaph of a new mother graphically explained her demise: “The unstoppable Fury of the newborn infant took me, bitter, from my happy life with a fatal hemorrhage.” And though male physicians and natural scientists, along with other writers and thinkers, may have been the ones with the authority to lay down practices pertaining to childbirth, they did so with information gleaned from anonymous midwives. (A few female practitioners’ names emerge from the historical murk, among them Phaenarete, the mother of Socrates.) Cleghorn reads the masculine literature with a feminist eye. When she cites the ancient authority of Pliny and his assertion, in describing the expertise of midwives and others who attend to pregnant and nursing women, that there is “no limit” to women’s power, she adds, “He meant this as a warning rather than a compliment.”

It is only in the modern era that women’s own experience of pregnancy, childbirth, and mothering begins to be widely recorded, and here, too, there is an omnipresent sense of the contingency of maternal life. In seventeenth-century England, there was a vogue for books by pregnant women addressed to their unborn offspring, offering preëmptive guidance and moral instruction to stand in for the mother’s own wisdom, should she be untimely carried off. As recently as a century ago, the activist Sylvia Pankhurst, daughter of the suffragette Emmeline Pankhurst, bemoaned the high incidence of maternal mortality among the working poor in the mill towns of the North of England, where, Cleghorn notes, “many lying-in mothers washed their feet before the midwife visited, so she wouldn’t know they had left their beds to see to their homes and children.” For women like these, questions of how to be a good mother were beside the point. Being a mother was good enough.

As Alex Bollen, another British author, reminds us in her irascible, informative volume “Motherdom: Breaking Free from Bad Science and Good Mother Myths” (Verso), what it takes to be considered a good mother changes throughout history, so as to remain always just out of reach. The good mother is self-sacrificial; she is energetically proactive; she is free from ambivalence. “Good Mother myths find mothers at fault however they raise their children,” Bollen writes. The author is particularly impatient with the popular dissemination of the often limited findings of neuroscience, and with the way that vulnerable new mothers are bullied by headlines that seem contrived to prompt a sense of inadequacy in those who are most likely already overwhelmed. One example, from the Daily Mail, runs, “Why a mother’s love really does matter: Nurturing helps children’s brains grow at TWICE the rate of those who are ‘neglected.’ ” Bollen’s own professional background is in market research, and, being well versed in the ways in which popular credulity is leveraged, she is also equipped to cast skepticism upon research findings whose standards fall short. Claims for the benefits of co-sleeping, she writes, are in one instance based primarily upon the observation of rodent behavior rather than of human. Her grim summation: “There are always rat studies as I quickly came to learn when I started looking under the bonnet of neuroscience narratives.”

What of being a mom while also participating in the rat race of professional life? In February, 2021, almost a year into the COVID pandemic, Amil Niazi, a Canadian writer living in Toronto, wrote a spiky piece for The Cut about what it was like to work from home while also taking care of her two small children. The piece took the form of a typical daily timeline, beginning with a squalling baby, an action-figure-toting toddler, and a husband who has departed for what, not so long ago, was also Niazi’s office, “a place I once loathed, that now represents a kind of mystical, holy land free of pointy, plastic superheroes and sticky, screaming faces.”

Now Niazi has turned that cry for help into a book-length plaint, “Life After Ambition” (Atria/One Signal). Its argument is that millennial women like her were sold a bill of goods when it came to marrying work and motherhood, and that the pandemic exposed hidden fault lines—notably, the inadequate provision of early-childhood care and the structural inequities of even supposedly liberal workplaces. Readers who got their small-child parenting out of the way before that particular global crisis can sympathize with the exceptional stresses of pandemic mothering while also recalling that being home with a wailing, incomprehensible newborn was hardly a walk in the park, even when a walk in the park wasn’t fraught with social-distancing advisories. They may also wonder whether Niazi, with her account of periodically working from home in the pre-pandemic era, really intended to supply ammunition for H.R. departments that want their workers back in the office. “On days I had little work, it was lovely,” she notes. “When I had to take care of a toddler and answer emails and take calls from my boss, it was like my brain was on fire.”

Niazi’s book is subtitled “A ‘Good Enough’ Memoir”—apparently a nod, if an unacknowledged one, to Winnicott’s theories of motherhood. In her reframing, however, “good enough” is synonymous with “mediocre,” which is the achievement level to which she claims to aspire: neither excelling at work, as her generation was told that it must, nor winning at being a mother, at least within the paradigm of intensive, intentional parenting that surrounds her. “I have embraced the idea of mediocrity and let go of a compulsion for exceptionalism,” she writes. If the supermom thought she could have it all, and the Pinterest mom prided herself on doing it all, and the performative trad wife believed that she could be it all, Niazi offers a depleted maternal alternative: fuck it all.

When being a good mother represents a structurally unattainable standard, it’s no wonder there has been a countervailing embrace of the opposite identity, that of the self-declared “bad mother.” The novelist Ayelet Waldman was this territory’s pioneer, publishing an essay collection by that name in 2009. She offered confessions of small, even cute, parental ineptitudes, like unwittingly criticizing another mother in a reply-all to the recipients of a mommy-and-me e-mail chain. But she also broached more significant maternal taboos, including the recognition that there might be limits to the kind of mothering a woman is prepared to commit to, and to the kinds of sacrifices—both of her own freedom and of the integrity of her existing family—she might be willing to make. Waldman acknowledged aborting a pregnancy after a prenatal test revealed a genetic abnormality in what would have been her third baby, admitting to “being so inadequate a mother that I could not accept an imperfect child.” Waldman portrayed herself as a bad mom other mothers could relate to (who hasn’t screwed up on a reply-all?), and also one from whom other mothers could stake out a relieved sense of distance: Would you abort a possibly compromised fetus, and, if so, would you then write about it?

In the years since, we have seen variations on the bad-mother figure, filtered through memes and graphic tees—not least the wine mom, who sustains herself through the repetitive boredom of child care with a cheeky glass of Pinot Noir around bath time, and her cooler sister, the weed mom, who takes the edge off with half an edible. The sloppy-mom identity is invariably ironic; nobody wearing a “This Mom Runs on Coffee and Wine” T-shirt means to advertise what her friends and neighbors might take to be a deleterious dependency. As Ej Dickson writes in the opening pages of “One Bad Mother” (Simon & Schuster), the freedom to make transgressive admissions of maternal failure bespeaks a cultural privilege. “For middle-class white women like me, there are few long-term material consequences for calling yourself a ‘bad mom,’ other than possibly being yelled at by other middle-class white women on the internet,” she writes. Not so for poorer women and women of color; Black children are disproportionately likely to be reported to child-protective services, sometimes for minor maternal lapses.

Still, Dickson counts herself among those deemed bad mothers, listing the credentials that earn her the badge of dishonor. “I text my friends Patti LuPone TikToks while Marco is on the floor playing with his toys,” she writes. “I don’t enjoy pretend play or cooking or cleaning or birthday parties. There are times when I don’t particularly like being a mom. There are times, though they are far fewer, when I don’t particularly like my kids.” Dickson, who is a senior writer at The Cut, satirizes the good mom she fails to be, whose kids “eat gluten-free pea-and-mango-infused organic gummy snacks and never, ever do things like hit or push or yell ‘Slayyyyyy, bitch!’ to a friend as a message of encouragement at the playground.”

Rather than linger on the Nap-Dressed good mom, in all her familiar brownstone smugness, Dickson offers a brisk tour of the bad-mother trope as it now circulates in popular culture, and an analysis of how it works. She ranges across terrain that has been fertile since second-wave feminism—most persistently, the question of how mothers are meant to combine parenthood with paid work—and draws on “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel,” the TV series in which a nineteen-fifties housewife abandons her domestic role to enter the ultimate boys’ club and become a standup comic. Dickson points out that Midge Maisel’s pre-kindergarten-aged children are rarely seen: “She is either the spunky self-starter climbing the ladder to pursue her desires, or she is a mother; she can never be perceived to be both.” At the same time, Dickson ventures into more arcane expressions of bad mothering, and if you were unaware of an apparently popular subgenre of porn called “fauxcest,” featuring fictional scenarios between, say, busty stepmoms and horny stepsons, here is your opportunity to learn.

Dickson writes with a refreshing absence of personal woebegoneness, and with empathy even for mothers whose practices and preferences differ vastly from her own. In her chapter on MAHA moms, with their eschewal of vaccines and their protect-the-children belligerence, she notes that, for all the ways in which external factors in the culture make being a good mother a timeless imperative—one that’s endlessly demanded yet impossible to achieve—there is also in motherhood an irreducible fear: that something terrible may happen to our children. Of the anti-vax, anti-mask, anti-trans, self-described mama bears, she writes, “We can judge them. We can think of them as stupid or even evil. But how can we blame them for being afraid? We all are.” Children are born into vulnerability and mothers into vigilance; and even then our best may not be good enough. Winnicott insisted that love, imperfectly given, was enough to get a child started. What he could not promise was that it would suffice to keep disaster at bay, because it can’t. An awareness of this truth, more fundamental than witching-hour misery or child-hostile workplaces, is the very worst of being a mother. ♦

In the past few weeks, among the yard signs for contractors, remediators, and litigators that fell like a plague on Pacific Palisades after some seven thousand structures were destroyed in last year’s fire, a new sign has popped up, with a pointed accusation: “They Let Us Burn.”

The sign is the work of Jeremy Padawer, a fifty-two-year-old toymaker and toy collector, whose company owns Squishmallows, among other plushie juggernauts. On the anniversary of the Palisades Fire, which killed twelve people, Padawer stood in his basement, a vast concrete space that opens onto a drained swimming pool with underwater windows. Recent heavy rains had flooded the basement floor, and a deep puddle reflected back a clear blue sky. Like most of his neighbors, Padawer had no roof.

The Palisades Fire, which started in the Santa Monica Mountains, was the reignition of an earlier blaze allegedly set by an arsonist, which had not been fully extinguished. Left to smolder unattended for nearly a week, it flared up on a gusty day, when firefighters were ill-prepared to battle it and hydrants ran dry. “It’s hard to imagine that a city like Los Angeles would have the ineptitude or gross negligence that would lead to a fire starting at 10:30 A.M. that would then destroy the entire town,” Padawer said. He added that the evacuation plan was also woefully inadequate. “If this had occurred twelve hours earlier, we’d be talking about many more than twelve deaths.”

Padawer, who is small in stature, with dark, glossy hair styled like textured buttercream, grew up in a modest household in the South, moving frequently (Georgia, Mississippi, North Carolina, Virginia, Tennessee). He made his first fortune while still in law school, establishing trading sites like AAbsolute Beanie Babies and AAbsolute Furby. (His insight, from studying the Yellow Pages, was that alphabetical primacy is one way to hack eyeballs.) Over time, he amassed an impressive collection of pop-culture memorabilia, much of which was stored in his basement: Charles Schulz cartoons, first-edition Pokémon cards, prototypes of action figures he had helped design.

“And how do you know Jesus?”

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On the day of the fire, Padawer didn’t take much with him: a stack of LeBron James rookie cards and a book of letters he had received as a kid, when he wrote to people like Mother Teresa, Fred Rogers, Colin Powell, and Ruth Bader Ginsburg, asking their definition of success. His older daughter, then a senior at Palisades Charter High School, grabbed a childhood lovey; his younger daughter left with nothing. Padawer’s prized possession, a rare hardcover of “Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone,” which he estimates is worth a million dollars, was in the vault of a bank that burned down. It was not insured, but, after a few agonizing months waiting for news, he discovered that it was undamaged.

In his career, Padawer has also done a brisk trade in domain names. In 1997, jumping on a tip from a Yahoo message board, he acquired act.com for a thousand dollars, and sold it two years later for half a million. He also bought jeremy.com, which he retains. When he and his family moved to the Palisades, in 2009, he snapped up pacificpalisades.com. Since the fire, it’s become a clearing house for his disillusionment about what he calls the “unnatural disaster” that authorities quickly suggested was due to climate change, inappropriate building materials, and plants being too close to homes: in other words, blame Mother Nature and her victims—not leaders, policymakers, or officials.

In town, or what is left of it, a large crowd gathered for a rally Padawer had funded. As 10:30 A.M. approached—the official start time of the fire, exactly one year earlier—he made his way to the disemboweled Business Block Building, a Palisades icon built in 1924. Magritte-like blue sky looked back through its paneless windows. Attendees held signs that read “Not Wild. Not Natural,” “State Policy Fucked Us,” “LAFD Where Were You?,” and “Today Pacific Palisades. Tomorrow your zip code.” Padawer got up on a stage. “They burned us down, and this is our origin story,” he said. The dolphin, the unofficial mascot of the Palisades, was no longer peaceful blue, he said, but red and gold—flame-hardened and enraged.

Among Padawer’s demands for the rebuilding of the Palisades—a police substation, regular brush clearance, better evacuation planning, the undergrounding of electricity—is a call for statewide insurance reform. (Many in the Palisades had been dropped by traditional carriers and relied instead on the state’s plan, which capped out far below their property values. Others had no insurance at all.) As it happens, one of Padawer’s early domain-name gets was for uninsured.com. “I sold that twenty-eight years ago,” he said, regretfully. But a quick Google search turned up a surprising bit of news: the site was for sale. “I’m going to send them an offer and see what happens,” Padawer said. “I would love to have that one back.” ♦

Fifth Avenue in midtown Manhattan is about twenty paces wide, curb to curb. Front Street, the main business street in Nome, Alaska, about four thousand air miles to the northwest, is two paces narrower but feels just as wide. Usually, there aren’t a lot of cars or pedestrians on Front Street, and the buildings that line it, none of them tall, seem to lean back from it. More dust and sand and rain and snow blow down Front Street than vehicles drive on it. Standing in line in the cheery post office on West Front, Nome-ites talk and laugh and exchange news. On days when the sand is blowing, some have goggles hanging from their necks or pushed up on their foreheads.

Nome’s sand contains gold, and other minerals. The iron in it will turn white cars a dingy yellow over time. During drier periods, small sand ripples form in corners along the streets, like sand on the bottom of a lake. Since the discovery of gold here, in 1898, billions of dollars have been taken out of Nome’s beach and from the bottom of the Bering Sea, just offshore. With gold at more than four thousand dollars an ounce, the gold dredges move constantly back and forth on the water on calm days in early fall. Ungainly with their beams and pipes, the dredges look like tufts of Rust Belt infrastructure that have blown loose and drifted westward and finally tumbled onto this distant sea. Rainy days turn the sand and dust on Nome’s streets into a thin grayish silt. This is what a place looks like when its streets are paved with gold.

The city of thirty-seven hundred residents is almost as far west as you can go in North America. Front Street parallels the sea, whose storms and giant blocks of ice have sometimes beaten the business district flat. Gold’s current valuation is just one of many international factors to keep in mind here. The Russia-U.S. border, which follows the International Date Line, is less than a hundred and fifty miles away. Provideniya, a Russian town with a formerly large military base, is two hundred and thirty miles from Nome. Cruise ships from Europe that have travelled the Northeast Passage route over the top of the planet stop in Nome, as do ships that have followed the Northwest Passage across northernmost North America.

Jim Stimpfle, Nome’s most famous citizen, dreamed up the 1988 “Friendship Flight” that opened the border between Alaska and Russia’s Far East.

Along the Alaskan coastline, it’s about a hundred and ten miles from Nome to Wales, the continent’s westernmost point. From Wales, it’s twenty-five miles to the Russian island of Big Diomede, and fifty-two miles to the coast of Chukotka, as that easternmost district of Russia is called.

Starting in 1999, I used to come to Nome to do research on a book I was writing about Siberia. I wanted to go from Nome to Russia, a goal that involved complications and extra trips on this side. One morning, in a Nome café called Fat Freddie’s, I met Jim Stimpfle, Nome’s most famous citizen, a man of grand ideas. The card he gave me listed him as a director of the Interhemispheric Bering Strait Tunnel & Railroad Group, whose intention was to dig a tunnel from near Wales to the “Chukotka Nose,” the very tip of Russia and of Asia, and to build a railroad that would go up the coast of North America, pass through the tunnel (“Just forty-one miles longer than the Chunnel!” Stimpfle said), and connect to another yet-to-be-constructed railroad, in Russia.

Stimpfle became famous in this way: His father was a dentist in Washington, D.C., with patients and friends in the diplomatic corps. Stimpfle wanted to be a diplomat himself, but after he graduated from George Mason University, in 1970, he ended up in Alaska, where eventually he married a Native woman, Yaayuk Bernadette Alvanna, whose family came from King Island, which is off the coast north of Nome. He became a real-estate agent; he says he has been inside almost every building in Nome. Through his wife, he learned that Natives on this side—the Yupik and the Inupiat—remembered relatives on the Russian side whom they hadn’t seen since J. Edgar Hoover and the Soviet government shut down cross-border travel and communication, in 1948, creating what became known as the Ice Curtain.

In the nineteen-eighties, Stimpfle decided to devote his spare time and energies to breaching that curtain, reëstablishing Russian-American connections, and reuniting Native relatives. By September, 1987, his efforts to restart travel back and forth had got the attention of Alaska Airlines and Exploration Cruise Lines. The Wall Street Journal did a front-page article about this lesser-known border, and quoted Stimpfle. After that piece, more reporters wrote about him. They said that Jim Stimpfle, a local real-estate agent and a private citizen in Nome, was working to end the Cold War.

At the Alaska Aviation Museum, near the airport in Anchorage, a Boeing 737 with the logo of Alaska Airlines on its sides and the company’s emblem of a smiling, parka-wearing Native man on its tail sits with other mothballed airplanes outside a hangar. A plaque beside it reads “Historic Flights to Russian Far East: Friendship Flight, Nome-Provideniya; June 13, 1988.” On that day, Stimpfle and seventy-nine other officials, reporters, and ordinary Alaskans, including thirty Native people, flew in this plane for an inaugural visit.

Photos of the delegation show Stimpfle on board among other smiling folks leaning over the seat backs and talking and standing in the aisle. He had coined the term “Friendship Flight,” and as the president of the Nome Chamber of Commerce had been agitating for the idea tirelessly. Mead Treadwell, at the time a young Yale graduate who had already been involved in Alaskan politics for a decade, remembers Frank Murkowski, then a U.S. senator, saying to him, “Mead, I’ve been getting Stimpfle’s faxes every day for a year and a half.” Murkowski was just one of dozens of officials whom Stimpfle besieged.

During the nineteen-eighties and nineties, residents of Nome and Russian citizens engaged in a period of trans-strait friendship and exchange.

After the Friendship Flight took off from Nome, it flew for about forty-five minutes and landed on the gravel runway at Provideniya’s airport. The cabin door opened, uniformed Russian officialdom entered, and a pattern began that would be repeated many times—the checking of documents, the standing in line, the triple-thump of passport stamping, the boarding onto not-new buses, the arrival at a dim official hall, the salty snacks, the sit-down banquets, the ryumki (shot glasses) standing in rows, the toasts being raised bezkonechno (without end), the mutual incomprehension, the unmoored good cheer.

I went up the boarding stairs to the plane and stepped into its open door. The passenger seats had been removed and benches installed along the walls. When you’re an airline passenger, knee to spine with your neighbors, you forget that what you’re in is just a big tube. The almost empty piece of aluminum echoed and creaked.

Stimpfle still lives in Nome and is still its most famous citizen. I went there in September, and he was the first person I called. Fat Freddie’s has closed, and Stimpfle now patronizes the Polar Cub Café, where he sits with friends at the same table almost every morning. Just beyond the café’s broad windows, the waves of the Bering Sea batter the granite riprap frontage. One morning, Stimpfle joined me at a corner table. I’d last seen him twenty-four years ago, an interval that has slowed us both. He wore a brown knit cap with a bill, a zippered jacket, loose knee-length blue shorts over gray sweatpants, and black running shoes. He is tall and strong-looking, and his blue eyes, which used to spark behind his spectacles and sharp nose, have grown mellow.

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Looking across the expanse of sea, he talked about his first attempts to contact somebody—anybody—on the Russian side. He began by filling balloons with air or with exhaust from his car and writing messages on the balloons themselves. Then, on a strong east wind one day, he released a weather balloon that he had filled with helium. Attached was a capsule containing small gifts—tobacco, sugar, tea, and sewing supplies—and a message of friendship which a schoolteacher in Nome had translated into Russian. Stimpfle watched the balloon rise and move offshore. Then the balloon began to descend, landed on the sea, and bounced along the surface. A seal hunter who happened to be passing by saw it and took it into his boat. He opened the capsule, saw the notes in Cyrillic, and thought the balloon must have come from Russia.

By following the boat along the coast, Stimpfle tracked down the hunter, Tim Gologergen, and explained about the balloon. Soon afterward, a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) research ship, the Surveyor, docked in Nome. Its captain had received an invitation from the mayor of Provideniya, Oleg Kulinkin, to bring his ship to its harbor for a brief visit—something that had not happened in sixty years. Stimpfle gave the Surveyor’s captain a message to pass to Kulinkin. The captain did, and when the ship returned to Nome he brought a message from Kulinkin to Stimpfle. That was the first success Stimpfle had in reaching someone across the strait. When the Friendship Flight went to Provideniya, a year later, he met the mayor in person. Tim Gologergen was on the flight, too, and found relatives in town, to whom he spoke in Yupik.

Stimpfle added, “I heard that Kulinkin was later murdered by the Russian mafia in the Russian Far East city of Magadan, in a hotel where I had stayed myself.”

In 1991, Alaska Airlines began regular service to Magadan and Khabarovsk, a city well into Russia, on the Amur River. For a while, the Russian Far East seemed like an extension of North America’s West Coast. Aeroflot began to fly into Seattle and Anchorage. Once, in the mid-nineties, in the Seattle airport, when I was on my way from Montana to Los Angeles, I talked to a man from Orlando, Florida, who said he worked for a Saudi-owned oil company at a site on Sakhalin Island where he oversaw an operation involving supertankers and pipelines and underwater infrastructure maintained by teams of scuba divers, who also brought up delicious crabs that he ate. He said the fishing there was excellent, even right offshore. He then got in line for his Aeroflot flight to Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky, boarding on the same concourse as my flight to L.A.

Trans-strait connections multiplied. In the fall of 1988, a pod of gray whales became stranded in an iced-in pocket of the Beaufort Sea, off the city of Barrow, on Alaska’s North Slope, and a Soviet icebreaker arrived and opened the obstructed water and apparently freed them—they were seen no more. Between March and May, 1989, a combined expedition of Russian and U.S. sled-dog teams trekked from the city of Anadyr, in Chukotka, to the city of Kotzebue, on the Baldwin Peninsula, with an airlift from Nome for the last stretch. An Inuit Quaker evangelist named Robert Sheldon led a five-man Native expedition going in the other direction, from Alaska to Chukotka, by snowmobile. They needed a helicopter lift over the strait, which by then was no longer freezing all the way.

Provideniya and Nome agreed to declare themselves each other’s sister city. Bering Air, a prop-plane airline started in Nome by a couple from Michigan, began flights to Provideniya and Anadyr. Direct phone service was established; previously, calls from one side to the other had to go all the way around the world, via Moscow. A group of Soviet Young Pioneers visited the Nome Boy Scouts. Stores in Nome put up signs in Cyrillic and began to accept rubles from Russian tourists, who had started to come. Later, the stores were stuck with the rubles when the Russian government would not exchange them for dollars or let them be brought back into the country. The stores made gift packets of rubles and sold them as souvenirs.

A charitable group flew a Russian burn victim across the border for care in the U.S. Dancers from Provideniya performed in Nome, and there was a game between the cities’ youth basketball teams. The local paper, the Nome Nugget, reported that, with the border open, three Nome-ites had found spouses from Provideniya. The story said that the Alaskan men liked how the Russian women dressed, in skirts and high heels at ten below zero.

In former times, Natives could cross back and forth without having to get visas, but that had ended with the establishment of the Ice Curtain. Now the visa-free program resumed, and thousands of Natives took advantage of it. There were stories of Russian visitors walking into the biggest supermarket in Nome, the Alaska Commercial Company, known as the A.C., and weeping at the abundance they saw there. A Russian Eskimo who moved to Alaska in 2004 told me that the first time she went into the A.C. she had twenty-five cents in her pocket. “I was leaving the store just behind this couple with a lot of groceries, and the automatic doors opened for them but then closed for me. I thought these smart doors knew I hadn’t bought anything, so I went back in the store and found a piece of candy for twenty-five cents. I paid for it and went to the doors and held my piece of candy up to the doors, and they opened and let me out.”

Hundreds of Russian students came to the University of Alaska campuses in Anchorage and Fairbanks, and exchange programs took Alaskan students to Russia. Sylvia Matson, whose ancestors were mostly Finns, had recently moved up from Sandstone, Minnesota, to join her husband, who had found a job as a mechanic at Bering Air. Not only is her husband also a Finn, but his name is also Matson—just by coincidence, because both families, when they arrived in the U.S., replaced their complicated Finnish last names with Matson, after a transoceanic shipping company. When she heard about the exchange program with Russia, she pushed to be accepted for it, even though she was a part-time student and not really qualified to apply. An exception was made, and in 1990 she and four other Alaskan students began the fall semester at the State Pedagogical Institute of Magadan, the public university in that city about twelve hundred miles west of Provideniya.

Magadan had a deadly reputation in the Stalin era, as a hub for Gulag mines where political prisoners slaved sometimes to death and produced gold and other minerals in the process. Matson arrived in September and moved in with a host family in which the father was a doctor and the mother an engineer. The entire district was rationing food, and people did not have a lot to eat. She thinks the family got extra food because she was staying with them. She ended up spending more of her time teaching than learning. Russians who speak English tend to have British accents, but as relations with the U.S. improved there was a vogue for speaking with an American accent. The students and teachers with whom Matson practiced English for many hours a day could not get enough of talking to her, and almost wore her out. They may have been surprised to learn afterward that other Americans they spoke to assumed they had learned their English in Minnesota.

With other students, she went on excursions into the forest, or taiga, saw abandoned and crumbling Gulag camps, rarely ate in the dining hall at the Pedagogical Institute (whose food was “really challenging”), and joined in the parade in early November honoring the glorious October Revolution. The school made clear that the American students were required to be a part of the event, which turned out to involve not marching but just kind of walking down Lenin Avenue to Lenin Square and buying stuff from street venders. She got the impression that the Russians who attended did not really want to be there.

In general, Matson and the other exchange students didn’t have much to do but be American. People invited them to dinner in their apartments. “There were families that asked me to come just because they wanted an American in their home,” Matson said. “It was humbling. To be treated to a lavish meal, and to have their children put on a special performance for you. And the little girls would give you their favorite doll—it was heartbreaking, and you couldn’t say no. Or they would just gaze at you and want to sit beside you on the couch. They dearly wanted to give to you because you had gifted them with your presence in their home. It was hard for me to know how to navigate that, at age twenty-four.

“When I left, in mid-December, my host family presented me with a lot of gifts, and a fur hat, and I knew there was an expectation that I invite them to visit me in Nome. But I couldn’t do that, for private reasons. I disappointed them, I know, and we did not keep in touch. Now my husband is retiring from Bering Air at the end of this year, and we’re moving back to Minnesota. We just sold our house and sent a container of our belongings on the container barge down to the Lower Forty-eight. As I was packing up and throwing out, I put aside the gifts the kids and grownups had given me in Magadan, and I’ve donated them to the historical museum here. The Russian women always said I didn’t dress up enough or use enough makeup. I still had the tin of pancake makeup they gave me. Now the museum has it, along with my students’ notes of appreciation, and the kids’ drawings, and a Russian Soviet Republic flag, and the dolls from the little girls. The museum says that at some point it will do a display about the years when Nome was in friendly contact with the Russians, and I’m glad these things will be in it.”

My own trip from Nome across the border happened in August, 1999. I flew Bering Air in a tour group consisting of two couples and me. Vladimir Bychkov, our guide, who met us in Provideniya, is a Russian Army kid from Chukotka, born when his father was stationed there. A mild and competent man, he would later become Provideniya’s mayor, occupying the same office once held by Jim Stimpfle’s first Russian contact, the apparently ill-fated Oleg Kulinkin. I had travelled a bit in western Russia by then, and Provideniya looked like other post-Soviet towns, except that large parts of it were ruins. After the Soviet Union ended, in 1991, remote places like this had been left on their own. The city’s population dropped drastically, and many of the high-rises were empty, with their windows smashed out and small waterfalls flowing down their front steps. After a few days in the town, we travelled by Army vehicle and boat to visit Native villages and stayed in fishing shacks or tents.

About a year later, the mood in the region had changed. People were talking about Roman Abramovich, the oil-and-aluminum billionaire, who was running for governor of Chukotka, mystifying everybody. Why would one of the world’s richest men want to be the governor of this abandoned, farthest-flung part of Russia? But he soon began to campaign throughout Chukotka and give money to local charities, and in December, 2000, he won the election, replacing the almost comically corrupt previous governor, Aleksandr Nazarov. Abramovich then opened new businesses in Anadyr and set about spending more of his own money on bettering the lives of local residents. He and his team rehabbed housing, repaired roads, reimbursed residents who had gone for years without receiving their salaries, brought in ships carrying food and supplies, and paid for talented kids from the region to study in Alaska. Chukotka residents hung portraits of Abramovich in their apartments the way Soviet citizens once hung portraits of Lenin.

The Carrie M. McLain Memorial Museum in Nome displays mementos and gifts that Russian citizens gave to visiting Americans, back when travel between the two countries was more open.

I became friends with Ken and Tandy Wallack, whose company, Circumpolar Expeditions, had arranged my visit. They live in Anchorage, where many of Abramovich’s projects took him. The Wallacks have worked on all kinds of journeys on the other side of the strait. When an American adventurer with time and money wanted to go up the coast of Chukotka and across to the U.S. in a Native umiak, or walrus-skin boat, to show that humans could have come to North America by boat rather than on land—a kind of sub-Arctic Kon-Tiki—the Wallacks found Native people to make his boat for him and guide him. The Wallacks also helped Fiat, the Italian car company, negotiate the Russia-to-Alaska leg of a publicity trip around the world in special heavy-duty Iveco trucks, and handled logistical problems for Philippe Croizon, the French quadruple amputee and distance swimmer, when he swam between the Russian and American islands that Lynne Cox had linked in her famous cross-border swim in 1987. The Wallacks speak only English, but they have a gift for understanding the heavily accented English that different kinds of people speak, and then repeating it in English that interpreters can understand.

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At the request of Abramovich, who had hired them, and whom they remember as pleasant and unassuming, they found places to stay for the hundred and fifty Chukotka high-school students he brought to Anchorage in groups of fifty at a time. The Wallacks set up visits to public schools, trips to McDonald’s, and other American activities. “For some reason, Abramovich wanted them all to go bowling,” Tandy Wallack said. “So we found a bowling alley for them and got them started—none of them had ever bowled—and they bowled.” The oligarch came and went in his private jet and kept a spare jet in Anchorage in case another might be needed at short notice.

In 2008, for reasons as opaque as his intentions in taking on the role, Abramovich resigned his governorship and went elsewhere in his extremely complicated and tiring-to-think-about billionaire’s world. The charities he set up for the people of Chukotka continued to exist, supposedly, but the interlude of benign mega-capitalist visitation in this part of the world was over.

“It all just kind of petered out,” Jim Stimpfle told me, in the Polar Cub Café. “The time of druzhba [friendship] across the border just ended. I went back to real estate full time. My wife had got tired of my spending so much effort with all this Russia business. And there was all the corruption, and the shakedowns, especially the landing fees that the Russian airports kept jacking up for Alaska Airlines and Bering Air, who both finally had to stop flying over there.” Alaska Airlines ended all its flights to the Russian Far East in 1998. Bering Air continued to operate an occasional charter flight until service to Russia entirely stopped with the war.

Part of the problem was that most people in the Russian Far East remained too poor to come to the U.S. or trade across the border in any meaningful way. Russia also began to be perceived as too dangerous. There were stories of American sailors beaten and robbed in Anadyr, of Japanese nature-documentary crews arrested and then released only after all their equipment had been confiscated. On one of the Wallacks’ trips to Chukotka, in the twenty-tens, when they were helping to make a documentary about an Alaska Native’s search for her relatives, authorities in the village of Lavrentiya detained them and their crew for having forgotten some paperwork. One by one, the Americans had to appear before a judge, plead guilty, and pay a fine. Some of the Native people of Chukotka, for their part, had grown tired of the stream of evangelists from North America. A Canadian preacher made a video of Natives screaming and crying and throwing themselves on the floor during a come-to-Jesus moment that he had brought about. Other Natives found the video demeaning when it was circulated. A few neighborly gestures still occurred—in the winter of 2012, Nome almost ran out of heating oil, and a Russian tanker arrived in mid-January to resupply the city. But after Russia’s seizure of Crimea, in 2014, remaining civilian communication across the strait began to shut down, and it dwindled to nothing in 2022 after the full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

Nome’s geographic internationality helped inspire Jim Stimpfle to work for Russian-American understanding and peace. Since February, 2022, it has motivated other Nome-ites to go to war.

Mark Hayward, a military veteran and a former Special Forces medic who moved to Nome in 2018 with his wife, was in the predominantly Native community of Savoonga, on St. Lawrence Island in the Bering Sea, on February 24, 2022, the day of the invasion. He had gone there as an employee of the Norton Sound Health Corporation to teach residents how to be their own first responders and save lives until victims could be air-transported to better medical care in Anchorage or Seattle. You can’t see Russia from Wasilla, Alaska, but, if you go up on a hill on a clear day, you can see it from St. Lawrence Island. “I’m ashamed to admit, I had checked out of the world,” Hayward told me, by phone. “But, when that invasion happened, I was so freakin’ mad. There’s the Russian coast, less than a hundred miles from Savoonga. If Putin can roll tanks into his neighbor, why wouldn’t he send a sub up here to sink a tanker carrying the oil that keeps my family alive in the winter? When I got home, I knew what I had to do, and so did my wife. She said, ‘You’ve read the news. Get your ass on a plane and get over there.’ ” He left soon afterward, intending to join the foreign-volunteer legion defending Ukraine.

I first learned about Hayward from an article in the Washington Post by Zachariah Hughes, a reporter for the Anchorage Daily News. (He is a college friend of my daughter’s; she put the two of us in touch.) Hughes had gone to Nome last winter and met Hayward in person, but by the time I went, in September, readers of the Post article had sent Hayward money to support his war efforts; one had even funded his return to Ukraine. While walking around Nome, I came upon and tried to make sense of the city’s former hospital building, which sprawls in an indeterminate shape and contains the offices of the Department of Motor Vehicles, a car-repair garage, a pawnshop, the Nome courthouse, and the labyrinthine workshops of Rolland Trowbridge, an enterprising man who bought the building and damaged his knee crawling around in its crannies as he rehabbed it for its present uses. Trowbridge is a collaborator of Hayward’s, and has assembled military matériel in his workshop for Hayward to send to Ukraine via the international courier Meest, which specializes in transporting packages between Ukraine and North America.

I found Trowbridge by asking at the pawnshop. He’s a tall and big man with a well-trimmed beard and mustache, thick, dark eyebrows, and no hair at all north of that. For everyday life, he wears work boots and button-downs. He showed me what he was working on: shrapnel-deterring body armor made of Kevlar fabric sewn with Kevlar thread on his extra-large sail-making sewing machine. (Trowbridge is a sailor who first came to Nome in his own sailboat, amazingly, from Michigan.) In other nooks sat a one-person motorized paraglider that has a range of a hundred and fifty miles and resembles something that Wile E. Coyote might use, and several intricate multifaceted handheld devices for jamming the radio signals that guide drones.

Rolland Trowbridge is a Nome-ite who assembles military matériel for colleagues to take to the front lines in Ukraine, in an effort to beat back the invading Russians.

In the nineteen-eighties and nineties, Nome residents had joined Jim Stimpfle in his projects of trans-strait druzhba; now dozens of them, by Trowbridge’s estimation, are helping Trowbridge and Hayward help Ukraine. Nome-ites have donated supplies, labor, and money raised at benefit events. He showed me slides of two used yellow-and-green Mercedes-Benz ambulances that he and Hayward bought with the money they raised, and drove from the U.K. to Ukraine in the summer of 2024. His and Hayward’s main achievement so far, he said, has been generating power for a Ukrainian arsenal of Javelin missiles that lacked functioning ignition and guidance systems. He said that by tinkering they put together twelve-volt motorbike batteries with improvised wiring that got the Javelins’ circuitry to work. Then the Ukrainians took these high-tech armor-piercing weapons to the front and “started poppin’ tanks” with them, Trowbridge said, forcing the Russians to turn back their advance on the city of Mykolaiv, a maneuver that could have led to the encirclement of the entire Black Sea region.

He showed me shelves and tables heaped with black, shiny Chinese electronics that he was testing and adapting. “I happen to know a lot about which Chinese equipment is good and which is junk, and how to order the best, which the Ukrainians generally can’t. And you always need to keep buying more of it because drone warfare is changing every day.”

Later, when I talked to Hayward in Mykolaiv from my hotel in Anchorage, he texted me a photograph of a sea-mammal-harpoon point made of shiny steel that he had brought to Ukraine from Savoonga. He also has a motorized paraglider with him. He said he planned to attach the point to a spear and take it up with him in the paraglider so he can harpoon an Orlan-10, one of the sophisticated drones that are killing Ukrainians. “I’m in this war all the way,” Hayward said. “I’ve spent down my I.R.A. and run through my savings. If Putin isn’t stopped here, he will keep on going, and we will all end up living in his gangster world. I’ll give everything I’ve got to stop him, and if I spend all my kids’ inheritance and more helping to create a world where aggression like this cannot stand, that’s an inheritance I’m proud to leave.”

In Nome, Trowbridge told me that he is worried about Hayward. He said, “I’m afraid Mark won’t be satisfied until he gets himself killed there.”

Gay Sheffield, the Bering Strait agent for the University of Alaska’s marine-advisory program in Nome, responds to concerns about sea mammals, subsistence-food sourcing, and environmental change in the region. She also serves as the commissioner of the Port of Nome. The scientific papers she has written or contributed to get down to the real details of life in the area. As someone who has spent a lot of my free time removing debris from trees in the five boroughs of New York City, I was drawn to a 2021 paper, of which she was the principal author, about a “marine debris event” in the Bering Strait in 2020. The study reported that, over the past two decades, five hundred metric tons of seaborne garbage had been collected from the shorelines in and near fifteen coastal communities. Much of it was “industrial fisheries debris”—floats and nets, pallets, deck boots, and various other items “with Russian, Korean, or other Asian lettering.”

Kitchen trash, vegetables, roach-spray cans, air fresheners, bathroom cleaners, a Russian Navy sailor’s cap, disposable gloves, water jugs, food packaging, juice bottles, men’s body-wash bottles—all had sloshed around in the strait and washed up on Alaskan shores. The absence of tampons or diapers in the debris suggested predominantly all-male groups of litterers, such as tanker or fishing-boat crews. The study said the debris could have come from a foreign ship that sank—given the lack of information from the Russian side, who could say? It stated and restated that without meaningful international communication the debris problem cannot be solved.

Other papers that Sheffield wrote or contributed to considered a huge toxic algae bloom in the strait and in the Chukchi Sea north of it, the ongoing disappearance of sea ice, and a recent increase in maritime industrial traffic. I hoped to meet Sheffield, so I stopped by the University of Alaska campus when I was in Nome, but she was on a research trip. When I spoke to her later, she told me that the federal government is not focussed on what is going on in the region. “Only two federal agencies are still in Nome,” she said. “The F.A.A. and the post office. The Parks Service office is closed because of the shutdown. NOAA has reduced its presence. So that means that, basically, the citizens of Nome and the coastal villages are trying to keep track of what’s going on in the region by themselves.

“The toxic algal bloom that happened in 2022 was by far the largest event of its kind ever seen in the U.S.,” she went on. “It stretched for more than six hundred kilometres in the strait and the Chukchi Sea, and certainly must have extended into the Russian side. Ultimately, we have no idea how much harm it caused, since much of it was carried out into the open sea, and onto the Russian coast. A lot of marine animals died, but we can’t be sure whether it was the algae that caused it. Consuming toxic marine life would have caused serious health problems in the region. The warming of the water and the continuing absence of sea ice have consequences. A big one has been the increase in industrial maritime traffic. More and more Russian tankers are bringing liquefied natural gas from the Gulf of Ob through the Russian Arctic, through the strait, and down to China. The federal managers for our maritime resources may have stopped paying very much attention to the region, but the Russians and the Chinese and those of us who live here have not.”

At the Museum of the Arctic and Antarctic, in St. Petersburg, Russia, there is a model of the Earth about fifteen feet across that you can walk around and study from above. What makes it different from other big globes is that it represents only the top part of the planet, no more than a quarter of the total sphere—that is, the entire Arctic and a few degrees latitude below it. Mead Treadwell, who moved to Alaska forty-seven years ago to work on Wally Hickel’s campaign for governor, has prospered there in the pipeline and telecommunications businesses, held political office (lieutenant governor), and served on many Arctic commissions, forums, and institutes. He knows that top part of the planet as well as anybody. I missed him in Anchorage, but met up with him a week later in New York, at another place of convergences, the Explorers Club, on East Seventieth Street. His conversation centered on Alaska but swooped all over that top-view, Arctic-focussed globe—from the Bering Strait to Prudhoe Bay to Russia’s Taymyr Peninsula to Greenland to Iceland to Finland to Wrangel Island, that island beyond the beyond, north of Chukotka, where Treadwell made two expeditions in 1990 that qualified him to become a member of this club.

He agreed with Gay Sheffield that we don’t pay enough attention to our Arctic. “The Barents countries, like Norway, Sweden, and Finland—and also the Laplanders who inhabit them—know much more about their end of the Arctic than we do about ours,” he said. He talked about the natural-gas fields of the far north, and described a fleet of Korean-built, Finnish-designed liquefied-natural-gas (L.N.G.) icebreaker tankers that have spoon-shaped bows and pointed sterns so they can go bow first or stern first, depending on the nature of the ice, and transport L.N.G. to China from western Russia via the Arctic route efficiently and economically. (He believes we should copy them in moving our own North Slope L.N.G. from Prudhoe Bay by sea, rather than relying on pipelines.) Communication between the U.S. and Russia across the strait still exists, he said. On issues of marine safety, search and rescue, and environmental emergency, the U.S. Coast Guard in Juneau still talks to the Russian border-security agents in Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky, and vice versa.

The ending of good relations across the strait in the Putin era is a subject he often returns to. Russia is just a difficult country. Even before Putin, Treadwell had his own experiences with Russian racketeers, such as the time a bagman told Treadwell’s Russian ecotourism-business partner that they had to pay the bagman’s boss fifty per cent if they wanted to continue in Chukotka. (A friend of Treadwell’s, who happened to be the bagman’s boss’s attorney in Anchorage, got him to back down.) And at a meeting with Far East regional Russian governors in Anchorage, Treadwell talked to Magadan’s governor, Valentin Tsvetkov, who said he was going to Moscow soon to negotiate a better deal for his region on fishing quotas in the Okhotsk Sea. Not long afterward, Tsvetkov was murdered on a Moscow street. Treadwell blames some shadowy criminal subcategory—“the Russian Far East fishing mafia, maybe?”

On the question of what is to be done today, he doesn’t know. “I always say that citizen-to-citizen diplomacy opened the border in the nineteen-eighties,” Treadwell said. “And failures of big-country diplomacy contributed to its closing, which started with Putin in 2000. First, Putin discouraged regional governors from doing international relations. Then he told the regions that he would be appointing the governors, and the citizens would no longer be voting on them. Those changes took power away from this neighborhood of the globe. His rise is a lot of the reason the border shut down. I think we could’ve done more with other Arctic-facing countries to counter that shift in power and keep our neighborhoods healthy.

“But there’s always change,” he continued. “A delegation of businessmen accompanied Putin on his recent Alaskan summit with Trump. I don’t know what subjects were discussed. But a lot can be done internationally with mining, shipping, fisheries, energy extraction, and tourism in our shared Arctic. Just because our Russian border appears to be mostly closed, don’t think people aren’t thinking about and planning for a different future.”

In September, 2022, two men who lived in the town of Egvekinot, in Chukotka, decided to escape from military recruiters who had been knocking on their doors. The men filled a sixteen-foot outboard motorboat with supplies and containers of gasoline and set out across the bay next to their village, then braved the open Bering Sea. After several days’ journey, they reached St. Lawrence Island—U.S. soil. Somehow, they had avoided swamping, sinking, drowning, exposure, hypothermia, or capture by the Russian border patrol. Soon after they arrived, U.S. immigration officers flew over from the mainland, arrested them, and brought them to a detention center in Tacoma, Washington.

The office of the Northwest Immigrant Rights Project, in Tacoma, took their case, and by January, 2023, it had won their release. According to Nicolas McKee, the staff attorney who represents both men, one of them has received asylum and lives in Washington State. The other is waiting for a decision in Alaska, where he has a fishing job in a Russian-speaking community.

Some thirty-five thousand Russians travelled by various routes to the southern border of the U.S. and asked for asylum there in the war’s first year alone; many have suffered in long confinement and with uncertain prospects. As far as anyone knows, the two men from Egvekinot are the only recent Russian asylum seekers to have come from the part of Russia where the United States is so close that under the right circumstances you can see it. McKee thinks that anyone else who succeeds in crossing the Russian-Alaskan border, as his clients did, will also have a good chance of receiving asylum. ♦

It’s 1917, and you’re Finnish. (Lucky you.) After six centuries of Swedish rule, and more than a hundred years as a grand duchy of Russia, your nation is finally on the brink of independence. To the south, Europe is tearing itself to bits in the First World War; to the east, there’s the Russian Revolution. Most of the art you’ve seen at this point is either second-rate or beats a patriotic drum—lakes and forests and scenes from the “Kalevala,” a national epic featuring some cosmic eggs and a drowned girl who turns into a fish. One afternoon, in the heart of Helsinki, you stumble into an art gallery and see a retrospective of a painter named Helene Schjerfbeck. It all feels familiar, but not. Here is a world where people read empty books in empty rooms, flesh is stretched tautly on the bone, and eyes are cold enough to freeze the light behind them. You’re not sure you like it, exactly. But of this much you’re certain: Finland has produced a modern painter.

The Helsinki exhibition drew around four thousand visitors, a record for the Finnish art world at the time. A local art historian, in his review, compared Schjerfbeck to Titian, Frans Hals, Rembrandt, and Beethoven. Notice the scramble of names there: a Renaissance master, two very different Baroque titans, and a German composer. The art historian was grasping at straws. A century later, we still are. The subject of “Seeing Silence: The Paintings of Helene Schjerfbeck,” in the Met’s Lehman Wing, is a portrait painter seemingly uninterested in people, an artist of the “golden age” of Finnish art who isn’t associated with its goldenness, and a modernist you’d have trouble finding in almost any history of modernism. That’s also what makes her work tantalizingly great.

“The Door” (1884).Art work by Helene Schjerfbeck / Courtesy Finnish National Gallery / Metropolitan Museum of Art; Photograph by Yehia Eweis

To become a famous Nordic painter, it helped to be born between 1860 and 1865. Hilma af Klint, Edvard Munch, Vilhelm Hammershøi, and Akseli Gallen-Kallela all understood this; so did Schjerfbeck, who arrived in 1862. As a child, she fell down some stairs and broke her hip. The injury left her with a permanent limp, creating an open invitation for every art historian and critic to psychologize her paintings as disguised self-portraits of suffering. Her father, a downwardly mobile civil servant, gave her pencils, paper, and crayons as she convalesced, and what started as art therapy turned into a calling. From an early age, she was plied with scholarships, travel grants, prizes, and exhibition opportunities. When she turned eighteen, she took a steamboat to Paris.

The Met show opens in the eighteen-eighties, when naturalism flowered in Parisian art schools. To see Schjerfbeck in peak naturalist mode, look up “A Boy Feeding His Little Sister” (1881); then dart up to the second floor of the museum, where Jules Bastien-Lepage’s “Joan of Arc” (1879) is on display. Note the square, almost pixelated brushwork and earthy palette Schjerfbeck adopted from Bastien-Lepage, who taught at the academy where Schjerfbeck took classes. This coarse, descriptive mode of painting was being used by the Third Republic for nation-building, uniting the motley cultures of France with an easy-to-chew visual language of freshly plowed fields, restaurant kitchens, and medical laboratories. I mention the nation-building because it’s what made naturalism such an exportable style, especially for a country like Finland, which was rushing to consolidate its identity overnight. In theory, Schjerfbeck was supposed to be one of Finland’s soldiers—she was in France on the dime of the Art Society and the senate—but her commitments were always more artistic than ideological.

“Self-Portrait with Black Background” (1915).Art work by Helene Schjerfbeck / Courtesy Finnish National Gallery / Metropolitan Museum of Art; Photograph by Hannu Aaltonen

In 1883, Schjerfbeck travelled to Brittany, where her first coup of ingenuity arrived, with paintings like “Clothes Drying” (1883) and “The Door” (1884). By filtering the grammar of naturalism through a fine mesh strainer until all that remains are skeletal forms and eerie compositional croppings, Schjerfbeck forces your eye toward an occluded or trivial detail. “The Door” shows a chapel interior with a closed door, a smudge of light, and no signs of life, except for the fact that the vanishing point is low enough to put us in the eyes of a child or a goat. In paintings, doors tend to function as little narrative machines, producing expectation or action. But Schjerfbeck’s is a narrative dead end. It’s as if she took one of Pieter Jansz. Saenredam’s empty church interiors and shook it until even the emptiness fell out.

What helped Schjerfbeck ascend from naturalism into the modernist ether might surprise you: Old Master paintings. In the eighteen-nineties, the Finnish Art Society sent Schjerfbeck to St. Petersburg, Vienna, and Florence to reproduce famous pieces for its collection. While reverse engineering works by Velázquez, Holbein, and Fra Angelico, she started to revise her techniques, fiddling with tempera, gouache, watercolor, and charcoal, and roughing up her surfaces. Puvis de Chavannes, whom she’d met in Paris, had been imitating the faded and matte look of fresco. Schjerfbeck also liked the way Degas bleached his pastels to deaden their tone. By pushing against the varnished, slick look of academic painting, and sapping its color into a chalky haze, she could pierce the viewer with a feeling of antiquity and melancholic potency. Once the patina of fresco entered her work, it never left.

In 1902, Schjerfbeck and her mother, Olga, moved to a one-bedroom flat in Hyvinkää, a small rail hub about thirty-five miles from Helsinki. The rustlings of Post-Impressionism hadn’t made an impact on Schjerfbeck when she was in Paris, but suddenly Cézanne, Gauguin, and Whistler crashed into her work, partly thanks to French art magazines. In Schjerfbeck’s homemade modernism, subject, color, and space all tend toward the minimal. With Whistleresque pieces like “The Seamstress (The Working Woman),” from 1905, and the almost scary “The School Girl II (Girl in Black),” from 1908, her palette constricts to pale blacks, grays, whites, and tawny browns. Rounded shapes are flattened or approximated with broad planes, so that clothes aren’t worn by the figures so much as blocked on, like shadows. Schjerfbeck’s mature style doesn’t just use vague forms but rigorously militates against detail. Details can be chatty and overeager; they populate the eye with information, rather than allowing the mind to invent it. “Let us imply,” Schjerfbeck said.

By the time Schjerfbeck had her solo show in Helsinki in 1917, two men had joined her camp. One was Gösta Stenman, who served as Schjerfbeck’s gallerist and local champion; the other was Einar Reuter, a young forester and artist, who became her confidant and crush. “Einar Reuter (Study in Brown)” (1915-18), painted during the honeymoon phase of their friendship, shows how Schjerfbeck, at the height of her powers, chose to paint someone she admired. It’s bleaker than you would hope. Schjerfbeck uses the rough weave of the canvas to turn Reuter into a husk of himself, with an empty pair of brown eyes and a mangled ear. Don’t mistake the depressive air for his own. Schjerfbeck’s portraits are not about showing you a person’s appearance and essence but, rather, about taking them away. Her anti-portraits, at their best and most psychologically lacerating, remind you how painful it can be not to have access to another person’s inner life.

The major exception to Schjerfbeck’s downcast eyes and turned-away heads is her self-portraiture. I’ve kept it out of the picture until now because it seems to operate on a different time line, as if there were a small, hidden room that Schjerfbeck entered every decade or so, to find herself again. Of the forty-some self-portraits done between the eighteen-eighties and 1946, when she died, there are two remarkable clusters. The first set, from 1912 to 1915, shows Schjerfbeck in her fifties, her face milk white, her lips pinched and stern. In one from 1912, a few colored brushstrokes—gray-blue above the brow, icing pink on the cheeks, a flash of gold in the hair—threaten to burst the illusion of her face into dozens of little painted moments. It’s the kind of loose handiwork that would have made Velázquez jealous.

“The Tapestry” (1914-16).Art work by Helene Schjerfbeck / Courtesy Private Collection / Metropolitan Museum of Art; Photograph by Per Myrehed

The second cluster, from 1944 to 1945, includes some of the most bone-chilling self-portraits in the history of painting—more so than anything Rembrandt, Goya, van Gogh, or Kollwitz attempted. At the age of eighty-two, in a final sprint of twenty pieces, Schjerfbeck painted herself as a putrefying corpse, with enucleated eyes and goblin ears. There are touches of Munch’s screamer, Daumier’s withering caricatures, and Géricault’s dissected bodies. But more jarring than any of this is the lack of humanity that Schjerfbeck perceives in herself. In one portrait after another, you see her skull emerge from a bed of living flesh. It’s the closest an artist has come to painting herself from beyond the grave.

The “silence” of the exhibition’s title, along with the depressive tenor of the show, plays handily into our penchant for Scandinavian noir and age-old stereotypes about the Finns as a bunch of cold, miserable forest dwellers on the edge of civilization. For all her cosmopolitanism, Schjerfbeck didn’t do much to dispel this. She was unapologetically chilly and, like Munch, cultivated her suffering. “Poor my life would be without the grief,” she said. I’d suggest that the real Finnish story here is that of an artist who painted freely, without being absorbed into the ho-hum progression of European modernism or Finnish nationalism, and yet was well supported by the state in her key years of artistic development. That might not sound like the most electrifying reason to celebrate a painter, but you’re unlikely to get one as daring, rangy, and brilliant as Schjerfbeck without it. America should take note. ♦

The ray-finned saltwater fish known as the bonito is also called, by some fishermen I know, the tiger tuna—a nickname that refers to its taxonomy (bonito and tuna are in the same family) and to its iridescent blue-green stripes. Early one morning in late December, the sky was overcast on the waters off the coast of Dana Point, in Southern California’s Orange County, and still the scales of a thrashing six-pound bonito, reeled in by the chef Junya Yamasaki, shimmered brilliantly. Yamasaki, who is fifty years old, tall, and slender, with long black hair that he wears in a bun, detached the fish from the line. Then, with practiced ease, he used one hand to hold it by its gills and the other to drive a small metal stake between its eyes and directly into its brain—a technique known in Japan as ike jime. The bonito’s body twitched until Yamasaki slid a thin metal wire down the column of its spinal cord, a second step called shinkei jime, which arrests its nervous system.

The method is considered significantly more humane than the standard alternatives for killing a fish (thwacking it on the head, letting it suffocate), and is analogous to halal and kosher butchery, which both require that animals be slaughtered with a swift, decisive cut to the throat. It also results in fish that tastes better and stays fresh significantly longer. “The process brings out the best characteristic of every species,” Yamasaki told me—a firm silkiness for white fish, a clean acidity for tuna. It works in part by stemming the flood of stress hormones and other chemicals that a fish’s body begins to release upon capture, staving off rigor mortis and the stink of decay. Conner Mitchell, a restaurateur and a commercial fisherman, and the captain of the Jamaica Day—the small pilothouse boat we were fishing on—was impressed the first time he saw Yamasaki do it. “I’m looking at a fish that would have been stiff, now as flexible as tissue paper,” Mitchell said.

In Japan, you can assume that the fish at any good restaurant met its end by way of ike and shinkei jime; in the U.S., the same is true at restaurants offering catch imported from Tokyo’s famed Toyosu Market. Among the fishermen of Southern California, the practice can largely be traced to Yamasaki, whose evangelism has quietly transformed the local seafood supply. On the deck of the Jamaica Day, Mitchell and an array of other energetic restaurant-industry dudes in their thirties—all of whom learned the technique under Yamasaki’s tutelage—set up rods, checked the boat’s radar, and gleefully spotted clusters of birds diving in the distance, which signalled that schools of bonito swam beneath them. Whenever a line began to jerk, the group exploded in a joyful chorus. Then the men took turns reeling the fish in, and putting them out of their misery.

Twice, I reeled in a bonito myself—a process that I found surprisingly intimate, just me and an invisible squirming weight at the other end of the line. Both times, I struggled as I turned the crank, heart pounding, almost certain that I wouldn’t succeed, until I caught sight of a silver flash at the water’s surface. Then Danny Miller or Cole Moser—a chef and a bartender, respectively—would pull it on board. As Miller gutted one particularly beautiful specimen, tossing its organs into the spray before slipping it into a slurry of ice and salt water, he pointed out that, because of the ike and shinkei jime, the fish had retained its vibrant color. If it had died slowly, it would have already gone dull and gray.

A full week later, when I unwrapped the bonito fillets that Yamasaki had sent me home with, I was amazed to find the skin undiminished, the flesh a rosy pink. I’d grown used to being disappointed by fish from the supermarket, its flavor so often muddy or bitter, with the occasional bracing whiff of ammonia. The bonito smelled barely of the ocean, clean and faintly salty. Following Yamasaki’s instructions, I seasoned each fillet generously before flash-searing it on a ferociously hot cast-iron pan, then sliced it into thick chunks to dip into soy sauce. The flesh was sweet, a little tart, and supple, like a piece of ripe fruit.

Several times in the past few months, when I’ve called Yamasaki on the phone—we met last year, at the Hollywood Farmers’ Market—I’ve reached him in the middle of a long drive. About once a week, he hops into his crimson 1997 Jeep and travels several hours from Los Angeles to forage for mushrooms or to dive for shellfish, at locations that he prefers not to disclose, accompanied by his dogs, Artichoke and Chanterelle. Chanterelle, a large and spirited three-year-old Belgian Malinois mix, has a challenging temperament; on the boat, Yamasaki pulled up a pant leg to reveal a big, gnarly scab where she’d bitten his calf. “I think one of the reasons she’s crazy is because, during the tuna season, I give her all the trimmings,” he joked—at least one of his fishing buddies has gotten mercury poisoning. “I’m a zero-waste chef, you know?”

As a kid, Yamasaki, who grew up near Osaka, went fishing with his father. It was only when he became a chef—a career he stumbled into while putting himself through art school, in Paris—that he taught himself ike and shinkei jime, which are associated with the Akashi Strait, a famous fishery not far from his home town. As the executive chef at Koya, an udon bar in London, Yamasaki cooked live eels, whose bodies could remain jumpy and unwieldy even once their heads had been chopped off. After learning how to paralyze the spinal cord on an eel, he found handling other fish to be easy. “Ask a vet—it’s much more difficult to do an operation on a Chihuahua than a Doberman,” he told me.

In 2018, Yamasaki moved to L.A. to open a Japanese restaurant, which evolved from a pandemic-era food truck to an idiosyncratic izakaya, called Yess, in the Arts District. (After his current lease ends later this month, he will open a cheekily named pop-up, Fuck Yess, while he looks for a new location.) From the start, he knew that he wanted to serve seafood, and that he wanted to commit to using local ingredients, as he’d done at Koya. Between London and L.A., he spent a few months at a Zen temple back in Japan, where practitioners grew their own vegetables and rice. “They pursue this as kind of a mission to learn about life,” he told me. He was dismayed that the best seafood he could access in L.A. was imported from Japan: “It’s fresher than the fish, ironically, from Santa Barbara, which takes a couple of days, sometimes a week.” He researched species native to California’s waters—opaleye, calico bass, moray eel—only to discover that most weren’t even sold commercially. “And then I found this YouTube video of somebody spearfishing, and I said, ‘Oh, my God, this is what you have to do,’ ” he told me.

Many of this era’s chefs claim to be obsessed with seasonality and local sourcing; for Yamasaki, it’s a life style, an all-encompassing pursuit. After taking swimming lessons, he learned to spearfish, and to free dive, so that he could gather fish, sea urchin, and lobster by hand. Without a commercial license, he wouldn’t be able to sell what he caught; he realized that if he wanted a steady supply of the best possible fish for Yess, he’d need some local fishermen to take up ike and shinkei jime. Most of his cold e-mails and Instagram D.M.s went unanswered. Finally, Eric Hodge, an auto mechanic in Ojai who’d been fishing commercially for a few years, agreed to take him out on the water for a demonstration. Hodge was amused that Yamasaki was prone to seasickness. “I think he threw up all day,” Hodge said, of their first fishing trip. But, after tasting what they’d caught and butchered, he was convinced that Yamasaki was on to something.

Yamasaki told Hodge that if they created a market for the product, and got other chefs and fishermen excited about the technique, Hodge could triple his revenue. (Hodge overshot this almost immediately.) Soon afterward, Yamasaki met Mitchell, who supplies seafood for his own restaurant, Dudley Market Venice. “What we learned, especially from Junya, was way more about the philosophy of why you’re doing it,” Mitchell said. “It’s not just ‘Run the wire down the fish.’ It’s about the fact that you’re trying to care this much from the second you take this fish’s life.” Within a few years, ike and shinkei jime became the gold standard for locally caught seafood in L.A. Among the prestigious restaurants to which Hodge sold his catch was Providence, in Hollywood, one of only two restaurants in the city to earn three Michelin stars.

In El Segundo, just north of Manhattan Beach, the founders of a startup called Seremoni have designed and manufactured a machine, the Poseidon, that performs an automated version of ike jime, with the goal of making high-quality fish more accessible. The company installs Poseidons, each about the size of a phone booth, on the boat decks of local fishermen, then purchases the catch at a premium. Each fish is slipped into a tubular opening of the machine, as if going in for an MRI, and then an A.I.-powered sensor determines where on its head to insert a mechanical spike. Restaurants, including Eleven Madison Park and Le Bernardin, in New York, have started serving what the company calls “Seremoni-grade” fish. Yamasaki himself serves the brand’s black cod.

Though I admire the ingenuity and idealism behind Seremoni, it was easy to see, on the Jamaica Day, what would be lost by delegating any part of the process to a robot. As we motored offshore in the morning, the brisk wind lashing our faces, we spotted a pair of sea lions dozing on the surface of the water; later, dolphins arced around us in every direction. Several times, at dusk, after the group had agreed to pack it in, a flash on the radar or a fresh flock of birds inspired Mitchell to whip the boat around and chase one more catch. When I remarked that the addictive thrill of deep-sea fishing seemed not unlike that of gambling, Mitchell laughed and said, “I think just as many people have lost their wives doing it.” As the sun set, he grew reflective. “The thing I’ll never get over is how there are so few people out here, and we all know each other,” he told me. “It’s the greatest place to be alone in L.A. I hope the TikTok kids never figure it out.” ♦

On the Friday before Mother’s Day, LaMonica McIver, a first-term Democratic congresswoman from New Jersey, spent the morning handing out roses in the maternity ward of a hospital in Newark. Her next stop, a visit to Delaney Hall, a federal immigration jail in her district, promised to be a more sombre affair, but she was “on a high note,” McIver told me. “We thought it would be a smooth day.”

McIver arrived at Delaney Hall just before one o’clock. She was joining two other New Jersey Democrats—Bonnie Watson Coleman and Robert Menendez, Jr.—to tour the facility. Members of Congress are allowed by law to make unannounced visits to detention centers as part of their oversight responsibilities; the three lawmakers planned to look around inside, then hold a press conference. As they were waiting to enter, McIver needled Menendez about his plans for Mother’s Day. “What did you get your wife?” she asked him, and acted scandalized when he said he hadn’t yet bought anything. “Oh, my God,” McIver said. “You have less than forty-eight hours!”

The members knew the rules of touring immigration facilities: their staff couldn’t join them, and cellphones weren’t allowed inside. A few months earlier, when they had visited another New Jersey immigration jail, in Elizabeth, a guard wouldn’t admit them. Watson Coleman, who is eighty and in her sixth term, produced a copy of the federal statute that authorized their visit. Twenty minutes later, the warden and a representative from Immigration and Customs Enforcement showed them around. At Delaney Hall, McIver recalled, “I just thought we would go in and have a little delay.”

Delaney Hall, which is run by a private prison company called the GEO Group, was the first immigrant-detention center to open during Donald Trump’s second term. Newark’s mayor, Ras Baraka, a Democrat, claimed that the company had bypassed routine municipal permits and certifications in its rush to secure the federal contract, which was worth roughly a billion dollars over fifteen years. An Essex County court was adjudicating the dispute; the local news surrounding the case had prompted the representatives to make inquiries. “The Administration didn’t tell us this place was open and operating, so we didn’t have any information,” McIver said. “The only thing we could really do is show up and go there and see what was going on.” She had told Baraka to meet them afterward for the press conference, which would be held outside the facility’s perimeter fence.

What happened during the next two hours is the subject of a pending criminal case. A group of ICE agents came out through the front gate and began arresting Baraka for trespassing. McIver and Watson Coleman tried to stand between Baraka and the agents. “You’re touching a federal official,” McIver warned them. “Don’t touch us.” The agents ignored her and pressed in. There was shoving and jostling. The government later claimed that McIver, in trying to shield Baraka, “grabbed” and “slammed” one of the agents.

Baraka was eventually driven off in handcuffs and held for five hours before being released. Ten days later, Alina Habba, the acting U.S. Attorney for New Jersey, announced on X that the charges against him were being dropped. But, she wrote, “the dismissal against the mayor is not the end of this matter.” The second half of her statement addressed McIver. She was being charged with three felony counts of assaulting federal agents. If convicted, she faces seventeen years in prison.

Earlier in the year, as part of a new directive to increase immigration-related arrests, “special agents in charge” at F.B.I. offices across the country were encouraged to investigate and charge citizens and public officials if they “obstructed” immigration agents. According to an official in the Department of Justice, the order extended to judges and immigration lawyers whose rulings or legal advocacy, including on behalf of clients, ran counter to the Administration’s goals. “You’d never seen that before, because it was so extreme,” the official said. By the end of the year, the department had filed more than five hundred assault charges against people accused of interfering with federal law enforcement.

The prosecution of McIver was the first in a pattern of escalating attacks by the Trump Administration against Democratic officeholders. Nine days after she was charged, federal agents handcuffed a Democratic staffer in the office of the New York representative Jerrold Nadler, partially on the grounds that, after her colleagues documented their activity, she’d been “confrontational.” Two weeks later, Alex Padilla, a senator from California, was thrown to the ground by federal agents after walking into a Department of Homeland Security press conference in Los Angeles. “It’s all been very intentional,” Padilla told me. “Donald Trump came in with a list of political enemies that he wanted to punish. The list keeps growing.” Brad Lander, then the New York City comptroller, was arrested in June for obstructing immigration agents while accompanying an immigrant to court in lower Manhattan. In October, six people, including a Democratic candidate for a House seat in Illinois, were indicted for “hindering and impeding” ICE officers during a protest outside Chicago. At the start of December, ICE agents fired pepper spray at Adelita Grijalva, a newly sworn-in Democratic congresswoman, who was protesting an immigration raid in Tucson.

Many House Democrats have taken out personal-liability insurance to hedge against the prospect of being targeted by the President. “We’re freaking out,” one Democrat told me. “You do not know what’s coming around the next corner.” The Administration has claimed that McIver is “aligned” with Antifa. She was “out of control” at Delaney Hall, Trump said. “The days of woke are over.” Press releases issued by D.H.S. stated that she’d “stormed” the facility and “broken in”; on television, a department spokesperson accused McIver of “body-slamming” an agent. “No one else in Congress is facing what she’s facing,” Lateefah Simon, a Democratic representative from Oakland, California, said. “Typically, we would say, ‘Oh, they’re just trying to scare her.’ They’re actively litigating this case.” At one point, a federal judge ordered Justice Department lawyers to instruct Administration officials to stop lying publicly about the incident. “It’s not local ICE. It’s from headquarters in D.C.,” the government attorney replied. “We don’t have the authority.”

“I live a stone’s throw away from that big house on the corner with all the broken windows.”

Cartoon by Matthew Diffee

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McIver’s case is expected to go to trial this year. By December, she had already racked up close to a million dollars in legal fees. Owing to House rules, the expenses have come out of her campaign funds, meaning that, in the months before her 2026 reëlection campaign, the money she’s raising will go almost exclusively toward her defense. “About five per cent of me regrets going that day,” she said. “Do I want to be hemmed up like this? My mom is worried to death. My husband’s stressed out. My nine-year-old is, like, ‘What the hell?’ ” But the government’s case, she went on, was meant “to slow me down and drain me of joy, and that’s why I’m so bent on it.”

On a blustery evening in October, I met McIver at her district office, in Newark. The government had shut down a week earlier, but a hum of activity remained. Staffers worked the phones from cubicles festooned with Halloween decorations. McIver, who is thirty-nine, with long dark hair and a ready smile, is personable and unguarded. She led me to a sparsely furnished conference room and offered me coffee and a snack. “I’m a mom,” she said. “Need to make sure everyone is fed.”

In May, during the week and a half between McIver’s visit to Delaney Hall and the D.O.J.’s indictment, Habba had proposed giving McIver probation in exchange for an apology. “I’m, like, ‘No, no, no, no,’ ” she told me. “I didn’t do anything wrong.” Habba, who was in sporadic contact with McIver’s lawyers, then seemed to suggest that she might have McIver arrested—to choreograph a perp walk in front of news cameras. “They were not giving us any communication,” McIver said. “My husband was, like, ‘Don’t go anywhere by yourself.’ ”

When Habba announced the charges, McIver’s lawyers searched federal court records to examine the legal filing, but they couldn’t find one; it came later that night. “First Twitter, then the court filing,” McIver said. In the months since, the President’s taunts on social media have brought Fox News coverage, death threats, and a motion by House Republicans to censure McIver on the chamber floor. “It’s just honestly been super stressful,” she told me. One Republican representative told her that he found the crusade against her “crazy,” but she couldn’t share his name. “That would be the end of it for him,” she said.

McIver, the oldest of four children, grew up in public housing in the Central Ward of Newark. “We didn’t necessarily live in the projects, but we did see things that could be kind of disturbing,” she said. When she was a child, her mother struggled with substance abuse, and McIver lost several friends to shootings. Politics became an unlikely lifeline, for which she credits her fifth-grade teacher, Ras Baraka. For two decades, Baraka, the son of the poet Amiri Baraka, was a teacher and a high-school principal who moonlighted as a candidate for elective office. When McIver was in elementary school, Baraka ran for a seat on the Newark city council. His students passed out flyers and helped register voters. For McIver, the campaign’s atmosphere of resolve and sociability was intoxicating. It was also an unintended lesson in perseverance. “He probably went about fifteen or sixteen years of losing,” she told me.

McIver, who holds a master’s degree in education, was the first member of her family to attend college. She planned to be a teacher, until she learned that certification would require sixteen weeks of unpaid student teaching. “My mom was in rehab,” she said. “As a working student, that was not a situation for me.” By the time Baraka started rising through the ranks of city government, McIver was working in human resources for Newark’s public-school district. In 2012, she and a friend from one of Baraka’s city-council campaigns founded a small nonprofit to mentor girls in Newark.

McIver was thirty-two, and the mother of a toddler, when she decided to run for a council seat, in 2018. What immediately struck her was how old everyone in city government seemed. She made it something of a personal mission to, as she put it, “attract younger people—and when I say ‘young people’ I mean, like, under forty.” Within four years, she’d been chosen as the council president. By then, Baraka was starting his third term as mayor. He and McIver were now colleagues, sometimes with competing interests. “You don’t have to figure out where she stands on a position,” Baraka told me. “People knew that you can’t just say anything or treat her any kind of way. She’s going to respond.”

In 2024, Donald Payne, Jr., a U.S. congressman from New Jersey’s Tenth District, died suddenly, of a heart attack, at the age of sixty-five. He had been in the seat since 2012; his father had occupied it for twenty-three years before him. McIver beat ten other Democrats in the primary, then ran in a special election that was held in September, 2024, less than two months before the regularly scheduled election, in which she would have to run again. “I originally was, like, ‘Why are we having a special? Let’s just wait until November,’ ” she told me. But Democrats were trying to narrow the Republicans’ House majority. “They needed bodies,” she said.

McIver calls the four months she served in Congress that year her “orientation.” She inherited Payne’s role on the Homeland Security Committee, where she received an education in the chamber’s intractability: constant partisan warfare and zero possibility of legislating, especially during an all-consuming Presidential race. “It’s kind of shocking that it’s that bad,” she said. “Can’t we just do one good thing for the people we represent? Can we just have a conversation?”

McIver, outside Delaney Hall and flanked by fellow Congress members Bonnie Watson Coleman and Robert Menendez, Jr., demands the release of Ras Baraka, the mayor of Newark.Photograph by Dakota Santiago

McIver had sought a seat on the transportation committee—it was one of the least politicized, and her district included both a major train station and an international airport—but, since she held a reliably Democratic seat, Party leaders gave the slot to a “frontline” member facing a tighter race. Immigration, meanwhile, was at the center of Trump’s campaign, and within weeks of McIver’s swearing in one of her new colleagues on the Homeland Security Committee, Clay Higgins, a Louisiana Republican, caused a scandal by tweeting that Haitian migrants were “wild” and “slapstick gangsters” known for “eating pets.” McIver told me that Higgins, who would later lead the effort to censure her, was “really, really crazy. This man opens his mouth and I’m literally taken back to Jim Crow days.”

When Trump won, McIver told me, “I didn’t predict it would be this bad. I just didn’t think it would be so unhinged and rogue.” Trump had been in office for less than a week when ICE raided Ocean Seafood Depot, a wholesale fish market in Newark, arresting three people. The scale of the operation paled in comparison with the sweeping actions to come in cities including Chicago and Los Angeles, but it underscored for McIver, whose top priority as a campaigner had been the cost of living in Newark, that there’d be no outrunning Trump’s signature issue. “I didn’t come to Congress with a strong background on immigration,” she told me. “I came to Congress literally to do the job and work for people and protect them. It just so happens that, at the moment of me doing that, it happens to be around immigration.”

Delaney Hall is situated in a desolate corner of Newark, wedged between I-95 and the Passaic River. When I visited the site in October, accompanied by Nedia Morsy, the state director of Make the Road New Jersey, an immigrant-advocacy organization, the street out front, which is on a popular trucking route through the city, was thick with traffic. A half-dozen semis were parked on the shoulder, their drivers sleeping between shifts. In a small parking lot outside the perimeter fence, a dozen people sat on concrete slabs, waiting to visit detainees. The odor of burning garbage wafted from a nearby incineration plant. I could see the Essex County Correctional Facility, a much larger prison down the block. “It’s all here,” Morsy told me. “Environmental racism and immigration jails.”

When ICE announced its contract with the GEO Group, last February, the facility, which in the past had served as a halfway house, had been unoccupied for months. On March 28th, according to the city’s subsequent lawsuit, local officials began to notice that, though an occupancy permit had not been filed, the interior parking lot was full of vehicles. Three days later, city inspectors asked to come inside to confirm that the building was in compliance with fire and plumbing codes, and they were denied entry.

The GEO Group later claimed that the building’s new function as an immigration facility was roughly equivalent to its previous one, obviating any need for further inspection. The Trump Administration was rapidly expanding its detention capacity in anticipation of what the President was calling “the largest deportation operation in the history of our country.” The stock prices of private-prison companies were soaring. The GEO Group’s resistance to state inspectors was perhaps unsurprising, given the potential revenue at stake and the fact that the company could expect to receive the full backing of the federal government. New Jersey was also traditionally hostile territory. In 2021, the state had passed a law, which was later blocked in federal court, banning privately run immigration jails.

In April, Baraka, who had recently entered the Democratic primary for governor, learned at a staff meeting that inspectors were being turned away from Delaney Hall. “I said at the meeting, ‘Look, we all are going over there,’ ” he told me. “Nobody would let us in.” Later that month, as city lawyers sought an injunction to halt operations at Delaney Hall, Baraka started going to the facility every day. “We would stick a piece of paper on the gate, showing the violations,” he said. “Every morning, they would take them off.”

Morsy and a small group of activists held daily protest vigils outside the facility. “It was quiet as hell,” she told me. Baraka came “like clockwork.” Once relatives of detained immigrants began to show up at the gate, looking for their loved ones, she assumed that the facility had become operational. “We wanted our congressional delegation to conduct oversight,” Morsy said. “The Mayor could try to use codes and zoning ordinances. But that wasn’t really working.”

At the start of May, the number of armed guards at Delaney Hall began to increase. “It was getting bad,” Morsy said. She no longer felt comfortable encouraging her group’s members to go to the vigils. On May 7th, two days before the congressional visit, Morsy realized that most of the guards were wearing masks. Many of them also carried zip ties. She began to worry for the Mayor’s safety. “It was totally isolated,” she said, of the facility’s location. “I knew something was going to happen.”

None of the representatives were surprised when, on May 9th, the GEO contractor manning the front gate at Delaney Hall refused, at first, to let them in. The GEO Group employees, Representative Menendez told me, were “less clued in” to the protocol for congressional tours than D.H.S. officials were; the members knew that they’d need to speak with someone from the government to start the process. Eventually, a car drove up to the entrance. When the guard opened the gate, Watson Coleman, wearing a beige trenchcoat, rushed in behind it. McIver and Menendez followed.

A man in a suit, who worked for the GEO Group, came over with an ICE official. They all shook hands. McIver already knew the official from ICE. In March, she and Menendez had met with him and another agency staffer at ICE’s New Jersey field office, in Newark, to discuss their plans for touring facilities under the new Administration. The official had been cordial and suggested that the agency would coöperate with congressional oversight. “Good to see you again,” McIver told him.

Around one-thirty, the three representatives were led into a waiting area in a security checkpoint with chairs and a metal detector. A third man, in a checkered blazer and a fedora, introduced himself as the warden. He was cheerful but evasive, telling the members that he’d have to call his “client”—ICE—for authorization. An ICE agent with a body camera stood across from them, recording everything and occasionally fielding questions. “We knew we were getting stalled,” Watson Coleman later told me.

At one point, the official whom McIver knew took the agent aside, out of earshot of the representatives, and asked, “So they forced themselves in, right?” The agent replied, “They moved the GEO guard aside. They pushed him.” This was plainly inaccurate, according to security-camera footage. But a D.H.S. statement published later that day alleged that “a group of protestors, including two members of the U.S. House of Representatives, stormed the gate and broke into the detention facility.”

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In the waiting room, meanwhile, McIver was growing frustrated. After about fifteen minutes, when the ICE official stepped outside, she followed him to the door. “We’re not just going to be sitting here all day while they play games,” she said. “I’m not in the mood for that.” A few minutes later, McIver and the official returned; she was in the middle of berating him. “Don’t tell me to relax,” she said. “Trust me, Trump is not going to be the President forever. Remember that.”

Just after two-thirty, a group of ICE officers entered the waiting area. One of them, a woman in a windbreaker emblazoned with “HSI,” for Homeland Security Investigations, was an ICE supervisor from the agency’s offices in downtown Newark. She asked the representatives how they were doing. “I was better about an hour ago,” Watson Coleman said. McIver added, “We had a rough time, but it’s getting better.” Another ICE officer, Ricky Patel, a broad-shouldered bald man in bluejeans, was speaking on a cellphone. He was the top-ranking agent at the facility, in charge of ICE’s field office in New Jersey. His attention was not on the representatives but on the parking lot.

Ras Baraka had already been to Delaney Hall that morning. He had left to take his kids to school and to go to the gym. “I actually almost forgot about” the press conference that afternoon, he told me. He arrived at Delaney Hall shortly before two, on the assumption that the representatives would be finishing their tour. A group of protesters were chanting out front, and, when he walked up to the gate, the GEO contractor said something about calming the crowd and let him in. Two armed bodyguards—the Mayor’s usual security detail—were with him. “I was waiting for them to come out,” Baraka said, of the representatives. “I had no intention of going inside.”

Now Patel and the other agents came over to confront him. “This is private property,” Patel told him. “There’s a sign that says ‘No Trespassing.’ ” Baraka replied, “We got invited in,” adding that he planned to leave with the representatives when they finished their tour. “You’re not a congressman,” Patel told him. A moment later, McIver, Menendez, and Watson Coleman joined the group. In a calm but firm voice, Patel told Baraka that he’d be arrested if he didn’t leave.

When the representatives realized what was happening, they were furious. “You are creating a problem that doesn’t exist,” Watson Coleman told Patel. She and Menendez were raising their voices. “This is an act of intimidation and you know it,” Menendez said. A demonstrator on the other side of the gate shouted, “You let him in, you piece of shit!”

Patel took out handcuffs and stepped toward Baraka. “You must be out your damn minds,” McIver shouted. “Hell no! Hell no!” She and Watson Coleman gathered around Baraka, putting themselves between him and the agents. Baraka finally relented and started toward the gate. Watson Coleman held his arm. “The Mayor is ready to go out,” she said.

Several ICE agents were wearing body cameras that afternoon. Multiple videos released as part of McIver’s legal case show a scene of palpable relief once Baraka went through the gate. McIver and the other members walked back to the waiting room. Two agents, who had begun loading pepper balls into rifles, put their weapons into the trunk of a black Ford S.U.V. “It got tense there for a second,” one of them said.

Patel and a half-dozen other agents remained by the front gate. He was on the phone—it wasn’t yet clear with whom. “No problem,” he said. “I’m going to take him right now.” He hung up and turned to the other agents, telling them that he had just received an order from the Deputy Attorney General of the United States, Todd Blanche. “We’re going to walk out of the gates,” he said. “I’m going to place the Mayor in handcuffs.”

The agents took a minute to prepare themselves. McIver, who was dressed in jeans, a white T-shirt, and a red blazer, which she’d worn to the maternity ward that morning, was near the building’s entrance. “Next thing we know, we see these people running back to the gate,” she told me. “We’re, like, ‘What’s going on now?’ ”

The three representatives reached the gate just before Patel and the agents exited. They all converged on Baraka at the same time. The decision to arrest him in the facility’s front parking lot, which is public property, meant that there was now a large crowd to contend with—protesters, press, congressional staff members. Two agents threw a protester at the edge of the scrum to the ground.

Baraka had told his bodyguards to step aside when the agents came to make the arrest. “I can handle myself,” he said. The bodyguards stood back and demanded to speak with the person in charge. The only thing that Baraka could hear, he told me later, was staffers shouting at the agents not to touch the congresspeople. The agents, he said, “were very, very rough.” In his periphery, he saw them with their guns drawn, “grabbing and pulling” some of the protesters. “My mind was all over the place,” he said. “I heard somebody”—an agent—“say, ‘Take them to the ground, take them to ground.’ ”

McIver and Menendez were trying both to keep the agents from swarming Baraka and to make sure that Watson Coleman didn’t fall. The younger representatives told me later that they felt an almost filial impulse to protect her from injury. “People were shoving and pushing us, and it was becoming very dangerous,” McIver told me. “I was screaming out repeatedly, ‘Please get your hands off of us. Do not touch us.’ ” She went on, “It wasn’t clear if these folks knew who we were. There was a man with a gun. I mean, it was crazy.”

When the government announced the charges against McIver, it zeroed in on four frames from one agent’s body-cam footage which show her making contact with Patel, who is identified as Victim 1, or V-1. The images are, at best, ambiguous. According to the indictment, McIver was trying to “thwart the arrest,” and, in the process, “slammed her forearm into the body of V-1” and “also reached out and tried to restrain V-1 by forcibly grabbing him.” McIver was trying to keep Baraka from being arrested, but the agents were initiating much of the contact. One of her staffers noted that her red blazer, which stood out in the blur of dark uniforms, may have made it easier for them to isolate images of her in the skirmish.

Two of the agents, including Patel, led Baraka inside the gate to a waiting car, while the other agents shoved away bystanders. McIver tried to get back inside, but an agent in fatigues and a mask blocked her path. He pushed her hard in the stomach. McIver pushed him back. Menendez wrapped his arms around McIver and pulled her inside the gate. The agent walked briskly to the back of the black Ford S.U.V. and took out a gun filled with pepper balls. “He just assaulted me,” McIver shouted. “I’m filing a complaint.” When he emerged from behind the vehicle, McIver confronted him. The recording didn’t capture their entire exchange. In her account, he told her, “Fuck you. I don’t give a fuck.”

In the indictment, he is called Victim 2. A still image shows McIver’s left forearm on his back and his elbow in her stomach. “If they’re saying LaMonica pushed a federal officer, then, without a doubt, those same charges can be brought against federal officers for pushing a member of Congress,” Menendez told me. McIver was visibly shaking, but almost three hours after arriving the three representatives finally went on the tour.

Before Alina Habba became the acting U.S. Attorney for New Jersey, this past March, she worked in private practice in the township of Bedminster. Her career was distinguished by her loyalty to her most prominent client, the then former President, whom she began representing in 2021 and whose golf club in Bedminster she was a member of. One case, which led to an ethics complaint against Habba, involved a club employee who alleged being sexually harassed at work. In another, Habba, who is forty-one, defended Trump against a lawsuit filed by a former contestant on “The Apprentice,” who alleged that Trump had sexually assaulted her. As a member of the defense team in the writer E. Jean Carroll’s defamation case against Trump, in 2023, Habba was frequently chastised by the judge for her apparent confusion in matters of routine courtroom procedure. “We are going to take a break here,” the judge told her at one point. “You’re going to refresh your memory about how you get a document into evidence.”

Even as a federal prosecutor, Habba was clear about her partisan commitments. “We could turn New Jersey red,” she told Jack Posobiec, a far-right influencer, during an interview in March. “I can help that cause.” One of her first public acts was to join a team of U.S. Marshals as they arrested fugitives, which she later posted about on social media. “She basically made herself into a witness in that case,” a lawyer in the office at the time told me. “People were concerned about being asked to do cases with her.” According to three current and former Justice Department lawyers, Habba had a list of state Democrats she aimed to investigate, including Phil Murphy, the former governor; Cory Booker, a senator; and Baraka.

Twenty minutes after Baraka was arrested, Habba made an announcement on X that said the Mayor had “willingly chosen to disregard the law.” She later gave an interview to Fox News in which she claimed, inaccurately, that he “was put under arrest inside the facility.” Baraka would go on to sue Habba for defamation, but by then she’d already seemed to realize that the government’s case against him was too weak to prosecute.

At a hearing two days after the government dropped its charges against Baraka, the judge upbraided Stephen Demanovich, a federal prosecutor who had been assigned the case. “An arrest, particularly of a public figure, is not a preliminary investigative tool,” the judge said. “Let this incident serve as an inflection point.” The admonition proved persuasive. Demanovich, who arrived in the office shortly after Habba took over, had been commuting to New Jersey each week from his home in Florida. He was a mystery to his colleagues, who referred to him as “Florida man.” After the hearing, “he left the office without a whisper,” one of them told me. “We never heard from him again.”

For half a century, the Justice Department had strict instructions, laid out in a manual, for how its staff investigated members of Congress. The main requirement was for prosecutors to seek “prior approval” from an office called the Public Integrity Section, which came into existence after Watergate, to insure that charges weren’t politically motivated. A week before McIver was charged, the Justice Department suspended the rule. The move came amid a welter of changes to the section, according to an investigation by Reuters. By June, the number of lawyers in it had been reduced from more than thirty to five. The department official told me, “Public-corruption prosecutors at U.S. Attorneys’ offices across the country, along with their F.B.I. partners, are now spending more of their time working on violent crime and immigration cases.”

The case against McIver was more promising for the government than the one against Baraka. Habba’s office had spent hours reviewing the footage to build an argument. Of the three representatives, McIver was visibly the most upset, and she didn’t hesitate to join the fray. Even some House Democrats—already skittish when it came to the politics of immigration—were uneasy about the optics. “The Newark case is messy,” one of them told me. “If you give the Administration something, they’ll take it.” In June, a federal grand jury indicted McIver on three counts of “assaulting, resisting, impeding and interfering” with government agents.

I recently asked a lawyer who had worked at the Public Integrity Section whether the indictment seemed solid. “I don’t see there being a viable case at all,” the lawyer said. McIver had been at Delaney Hall for an official legislative function, and the officers themselves had seemed to cause “chaos and mass confusion.” Ultimately, the lawyer said, “it matters that she’s a congressperson. These cases get a lot more attention, and they have much broader implications when you’re dragging a congressperson into court for hearings. We never would have pursued this.”

In the summer, Habba faced a reckoning of her own. Nominated by Trump but unconfirmed by the Senate, she had been serving for an interim period of a hundred and twenty days when federal district-court judges in the state determined that she could no longer legally remain in the post. The ruling was widely expected. On July 17th, a few days before it was issued, Habba convened a meeting on the seventh floor of the Newark office. At a podium in front of an American flag, she tearfully told her staff that she’d enjoyed working in public service. “It was a bunch of bromides and puffery,” one of the attendees told me. “No one took her at face value. We knew she was staying.”

On July 22nd, the morning of the ruling, the chief judge of the U.S. District Court of New Jersey called Habba with the news that the panel had chosen her deputy, Desiree Grace, as her replacement. Habba, who spoke on a regular basis to Pam Bondi, the U.S. Attorney General, and Blanche, the Deputy Attorney General, closed the door to her office and made a series of phone calls. People working on the floor heard her screaming into the receiver. At five o’clock that evening, Grace’s work phone went dead. She’d been fired. “It was assumed that Alina did that,” the attendee said.

Habba remained in the post, but in August another federal judge ruled that she was “not lawfully holding the office.” The decision had immediate implications for a number of cases. One judge on the verge of issuing a criminal sentence postponed her ruling indefinitely, on the basis that Habba now lacked the legal authority to represent the government. The Trump Administration had tried a convoluted strategy so that Habba could continue to bring cases: it withdrew her nomination, named her as a “special attorney,” appointed her to Grace’s previous position as deputy, and then elevated her to acting U.S. Attorney to fill the new vacancy. But, on December 8th, a week after an appeals court once again ruled against her, Habba resigned. She announced that she was leaving the office to serve as an adviser to Bondi. “Do not mistake compliance for surrender,” Habba wrote on X.

For McIver, the news didn’t change much. Habba had secured the indictment before her provisional term expired. To hedge against any lingering questions about Habba’s authority, the government had, for months, added a second name next to Habba’s on the signature block of its court filings. It was that of Todd Blanche, who had ordered the arrest that set McIver’s prosecution in motion.

At the start of Trump’s second term, Blanche, a fifty-year-old former prosecutor in the Southern District of New York, was thought to have the potential to be a moderating influence inside the Justice Department. His personal background was atypical of the élite legal circles in which he rose. As a young father of two children, he commuted from Long Island to New York City to be a paralegal in the U.S. Attorney’s office and went to law school at night. “We called him Wonder Boy,” one of his former colleagues told me. “He was never the smartest guy in the room or the best writer. But people wanted to work with him.”

Blanche eventually entered private practice and became a partner at Cadwalader, Wickersham & Taft, the oldest white-shoe firm in the city. His clients included Paul Manafort, Trump’s former campaign manager, who was convicted of fraud and faced additional charges, and Boris Epshteyn, one of the President’s top advisers, who was accused of interfering with the 2020 election. “He would sit in the dining room at Mar-a-Lago and pick up clients,” a former colleague at the firm told me. Other Cadwalader lawyers may have personally disliked some of the figures on Blanche’s client list, but they considered him a “good firm citizen,” someone who was collegial, approachable, and generous with his time.

That changed in 2023, when Blanche told the firm’s other partners that he wanted to defend Trump, who had been indicted in Manhattan for falsifying business records. “He genuinely believed that the prosecution of Trump was politically motivated,” a source with knowledge of the firm told me. The partners felt that, after the riot at the Capitol on January 6th, representing Trump would hurt the firm’s reputation. They were also concerned that Trump, who was notorious for mistreating his lawyers, wouldn’t pay his legal fees. The partners wouldn’t allow Blanche to retain Trump as a Cadwalader client, and Blanche said he would leave the firm. “Todd was, like, ‘I’m doing this,’ ” the source with knowledge of the firm told me. “It was a difficult decision. They liked the guy. The firm was reluctant to let him go.”

During Trump’s trial, Blanche seemed to undergo a conversion. He moved to Florida and adopted a bellicose persona in court and in the media. “I don’t recognize him,” the former colleague at the firm told me. “Todd’s only hope after that trial was to go into government.” Many assumed that he was angling for an appointment as the U.S. Attorney in the Southern District of New York. Instead, when Trump returned to office, Blanche secured a higher perch—the No. 2 post at the Justice Department.

Last winter, Trump issued a series of executive orders and memorandums that punished prominent law firms with ties to people or causes that the President felt were opposed to him. Rather than fight the action in court, the managing partners at Paul, Weiss, a marquee New York law firm, decided to strike a deal with the White House. The firm agreed to devote forty million dollars’ worth of pro-bono services to causes approved by the President. This set off a cascade of similar deals, with the Administration raising the price in each subsequent negotiation. The next firm to settle, Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom, agreed to a figure of a hundred million dollars. The third, Willkie Farr & Gallagher, was initially told that the demand would be a hundred and twenty-five million dollars.

“If you’re watching this tape, it can mean only one thing—you need to upgrade your home-entertainment system.”

Cartoon by Brendan Loper

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In the spring, the partners at Cadwalader heard a rumor that they were next in the Administration’s crosshairs—a shock, given the firm’s past ties to people in Trump’s inner circle. Douglas Gansler, a senior lawyer, called Epshteyn, who was the President’s de-facto representative in negotiations with the law firms. Paul, Weiss has an annual budget of roughly a hundred and seventy-five million dollars for pro-bono work; Cadwalader’s, by contrast, was between five and seven million dollars. Epshteyn told Gansler that to avoid punishment the firm would have to agree to the going rate—a hundred million dollars to litigate causes aligned with the President’s agenda. The impression at Cadwalader had been that the split with Blanche was amicable. “This was how we learned that Todd felt bitter about the decision,” the source with knowledge of the firm told me. “It was a slap in the face from Todd.”

As Deputy Attorney General, Blanche has gone to special lengths to defend the President. In July, he met with the convicted sex trafficker Ghislaine Maxwell, reportedly in an effort to blunt the political fallout from Trump’s reluctance to release the government’s files on Maxwell’s benefactor, Jeffrey Epstein. But Blanche has more frequently gone on the offensive to advance the President’s principal obsessions: enforcing immigration laws and pursuing his political opponents. On March 6th, D.O.J. employees received a memo from Blanche with the subject “Operation Take Back America.” The goal, he wrote, was to “surge existing resources” to fulfill Trump’s agenda of “stopping illegal immigration,” “eliminating Cartels,” and “ending illegal trafficking of dangerous drugs and human beings.” In practice, this meant “responding and investigating instances of obstruction in sanctuary jurisdictions.”

That same week, the Administration began transferring Venezuelan migrants accused of belonging to the gang Tren de Aragua to ICE detention centers in Texas, in preparation for their eventual rendition to El Salvador under the Alien Enemies Act. According to a subsequent court declaration by Emil Bove, who at the time worked directly under Blanche (before Trump appointed him to an appellate-court judgeship), Blanche was involved in privileged discussions “regarding the transfer of custody of aliens who had been detained pursuant to the Alien Enemies Act and removed from the United States.” The government deported more than a hundred of the migrants in clear violation of a federal judge’s injunction. With some of them on a plane was Kilmar Abrego García, a Salvadoran who was deported as a result of an administrative error. When a veteran department attorney presenting the case to a judge admitted that the deportation was a mistake, Blanche suspended him for “engaging in conduct prejudicial to your client.”

Blanche has seemed most comfortable vilifying Trump’s critics. Last September, he told CNN that a group of women who protested Trump while he dined at a Washington restaurant could be charged under the RICO Act, a law typically used against gangs and organized crime. The following month, Blanche published a letter threatening to prosecute California officials who advocated the idea of arresting immigration agents who broke state laws during raids. (Agents, he wrote, could not be charged with state crimes if they were performing their federal duties.) At an event for the Federalist Society, in November, he lashed out at judges who ruled against the Administration, saying that the country was “at war.”

On the afternoon of June 12th, a protest erupted inside Delaney Hall. The detainees had been complaining about conditions at the facility for days. Because of overcrowding, some of them were sleeping on the ground. Their meals, which came intermittently, sometimes consisted of just a few slices of bread. On the upper floor of the facility, several dozen men started covering up security cameras and breaking windows. A Salvadoran woman told the Times that, just before 6 P.M., she received a panicked call from her brother, who was being detained at Delaney Hall: “He told me he was scared and didn’t know what would happen to him.” An emergency immigration hotline took a call from Delaney Hall in which the operator heard screams in the background. Four men escaped the facility by tearing down one of the building’s walls.

McIver was on a train from Washington to Newark when she got the news. She’d been indicted two days earlier and had just appeared on MSNBC to discuss her case. “I expect bad news all the time from these places,” McIver told me, in reference to ICE detention centers. “But I knew something would happen at Delaney.” When she and the other representatives had toured the facility, they noticed certain irregularities. The phones weren’t working, and they got stuck in an elevator. It was lunchtime, but the kitchen was empty. “You didn’t even have a sniff of food,” McIver told me. At the Elizabeth detention center, the representatives had been given hairnets when they walked through the kitchen, where cooks were preparing meals. “We didn’t have any of that at Delaney,” she told me. “No one was there.”

By the summer, with the White House pressuring ICE to arrest some three thousand people a day, the population in detention nationwide was growing. There were some fifty-six thousand people in more than a hundred and thirty facilities that, together, were designed to hold forty-one thousand people. Conditions at many of the detention centers were rapidly deteriorating.

In Miami, underfed detainees described being denied medical treatment. One morning in June, a group of them gathered in the yard to spell out a human sign that said “SOS.” Twenty-seven women were forced into a small holding cell after spending hours cuffed and chained on a bus where guards refused to give them food, water, or access to a toilet, according to USA Today; they were told to urinate on the floor. Immigrants who’d been arrested at routine ICE check-ins in Los Angeles were kept overnight in the basement of a federal building. In New York, a Peruvian immigrant filed a lawsuit over mistreatment at 26 Federal Plaza, where ICE has held about half of the two thousand people it’s detained in the city since January. Dozens of men were crammed into a two-hundred-and-fifteen-square-foot cell; one of them lost twenty-four pounds while in custody. A common concern, reported by detainees held across the country, was that they were not allowed to speak to lawyers or family members, rendering them almost completely cut off from the outside world.

The experience of McIver, Watson Coleman, and Menendez in May was the harbinger of a policy shift at ICE. In the summer, twelve Democratic representatives from six other states were blocked when they showed up at detention centers for unannounced visits. The agency offered a range of explanations. In mid-June, on its website, ICE said that, though members could visit detention centers where immigrants were held for prolonged periods of time, they couldn’t tour field offices that weren’t designed for long-term confinement. Yet in New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago, ICE was using field offices as de-facto jails. The agency then stipulated that members of Congress were required to inform the government a week before attempting a visit. On July 30th, a group of Democrats sued the Administration, seeking to get the policy overturned.

One of the plaintiffs in that case is Jason Crow, a forty-six-year-old combat veteran from Colorado who’s currently in his fourth term in the House. The Denver Contract Detention Facility, a jail run by the GEO Group, is in his district, which spans parts of Denver and the neighboring city of Aurora. On July 20th, he showed up for a tour and, after waiting an hour, was turned away. Several weeks later, when one of Crow’s staffers went to the facility, following a different but related set of protocols, two conservative members of the Aurora City Council accosted him. One of them recorded a video of the interaction on his phone, while the other yelled that the staffer was “here to meet with criminals.”

The treatment was especially striking to Crow because he had helped make unannounced visits a legally protected part of the congressional appropriations process. Like McIver, he didn’t have a background in immigration policy. “I’m not a likely ally for this issue,” he told me. “I’m a working-class military veteran from the Upper Midwest.” He was struck, however, by the degree to which immigration jails were unregulated compared with facilities that held U.S. citizens. In 2019, as a freshman House member, he created an inspection checklist based on national detention standards. That February, Congress added a provision to its annual appropriation bill which codified the members’ right to make in-person visits to facilities where children were being held by the government; at the end of the year, Congress inserted a rider into the funding bill which allowed them to visit any facilities detaining immigrants.

The language of the bill was unequivocal on one point: representatives would never be required to provide “prior notice” of their visits. That year, members of the Homeland Security Committee published a report describing how ICE officials had “used the advanced warning to improve the conditions.” They observed fresh paint, cleaning supplies, the assignment of new guards, and the transfer of detainees from solitary confinement to the general population. Crow himself went on to make ten oversight visits; his staff conducted close to ninety. The incident at the Aurora facility in July, according to the lawsuit, represented “the first time since he began conducting oversight visits in February 2019” that he “was denied in his attempt to visit” the detention center in his district. “They know right now under this Administration that they’re untouchable,” Crow said of ICE. “There’s nothing they can do that’s going to get them in trouble with Trump and his minions . . . but they can’t hide behind their masks forever.”

On December 5th, McIver and I met for lunch at Swahili Village, a restaurant in Newark. It was late on a Friday afternoon and there were no other diners. McIver, dressed in jeans and a green sweater with matching glasses, seemed tired but relaxed. Constituents often expressed their appreciation to her for standing up to the Administration, but she regretted that, in the images most had seen of her, she was frozen in a moment of anger. “I want to be presentable all the time,” she told me. “I don’t want people to see me in the light of having to be like that.”

In October, during oral arguments, McIver’s legal team had tried to get the judge to dismiss the charges, on the grounds that the Justice Department had engaged in “selective” and “vindictive” prosecution and that she had legislative immunity. “It is all about politics and partisanship,” McIver’s lawyers had written in their brief. During the hearing, McIver, who had never been to court before, looked slightly stunned; afterward, on the courtroom steps, she addressed a crowd of supporters, while her mother, her husband, and two of her sisters stood nearby. “I want to be clear to everyone,” she said. “This process has not stopped me from doing my job.” Three weeks later, the judge rejected her legal team’s arguments, allowing the case to go to trial.

Knowing what she knows now, McIver said, she would still have gone to Delaney Hall in May. But she allowed that “maybe I should not have been so vocal there. Maybe I should have, you know, shut my ass up, not been yelling and telling them how they were wrong.” She noted that Watson Coleman, who’d stood next to her during the altercation, hadn’t been charged with impeding the agents. One explanation was that Watson Coleman, at eighty, wasn’t as imposing. But she’d also been more measured than McIver. “Is it because she wasn’t as loud as me?” McIver said. “Like, she didn’t use as many curse words?” McIver told me that, when such doubts creep in, she tells herself, “You were supposed to be there. You were supposed to go there.”

McIver and her legal team are appealing the judge’s ruling, arguing that her case for legislative immunity should carry more weight. There are compelling legal arguments for this. Josh Chafetz, a professor at Georgetown Law, told me, “Oversight of ICE would include monitoring their conduct outside the gates of Delaney Hall when they tried to arrest the Mayor.” McIver noted that the agent who pushed her on May 9th “knew who we were. We were just in there.” She went on, “The only reason we were outside the fucking gate is because they would not give us a tour.”

As a Black woman, she felt that the suggestion that she hadn’t been doing her job in May was like being told she didn’t deserve the job. “It brought me back to a different time, a time before the civil-rights movement,” she said. “It was racism. It was lack of respect.” (The morning of the incident, the agent who shoved McIver “used a racial slur to refer to African Americans” in a text message sent to the other agents at the facility, according to a recent court filing by McIver’s lawyers, who’ve seen the messages; for now the texts are under seal by the district court.)

Legislative immunity was also important to her because, without it, the Administration could punish her even in the absence of a trial. Her campaign was running out of money; the government’s prosecutorial resources were infinite. “It’s all about tearing down a Democratic member of Congress,” she said. “It’s about embarrassing, bullying, intimidating so that everyone can watch.” McIver began to tear up. “They probably thought, No one’s gonna fucking pay attention to her. This is great. Let’s use her as an example.”

Two weeks later, ICE announced that Jean Wilson Brutus, a forty-one-year-old Haitian detained at Delaney Hall, had died while in custody. In a press release, the government called his cause of death “a medical emergency.” He was one of thirty-two people who died in ICE custody in 2025, making it the deadliest year in more than two decades for immigrants in detention.

McIver called me a few nights later, sounding both outraged and resolved. The next morning, she told me, she was planning on returning to Delaney Hall, joined by Menendez and Yvette Clarke, the chairwoman of the Congressional Black Caucus. This time, McIver had alerted ICE in advance, though she was not required to do so; in mid-December, a federal judge in Washington, D.C., ruled in favor of the congressional Democrats who had sued the agency, finding that ICE couldn’t block unannounced visits. (On January 8th, the Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, disregarding the ruling, banned such visits once again.) “My thing is not to hate these people,” McIver said. “I want to have a working relationship.”

The morning of December 23rd was cold and raw. An early snow had turned to rain and sleet by nine o’clock, when McIver arrived at Delaney Hall, in a black Suburban. A small group of protesters and journalists stood out front, but none of them seemed to notice her. The Suburban rolled up to the gate, where a GEO employee waved her inside. She emerged, three hours later, with Menendez and Clarke, for a press conference—an uncanny parallel to the visit in May.

Afterward, I rode with her back to her office in Newark. The officials at the jail wouldn’t address Brutus’s death, but McIver and the others had been able to interview about twenty detainees. “When we told them about the man who died, they didn’t even know,” she said. One of them started to cry. A Venezuelan woman told McIver that, weeks before, out of desperation to leave U.S. custody, she’d signed a so-called voluntary-departure order. Inexplicably, she’d been transferred to another facility, in Louisiana, then returned to Delaney Hall.

McIver’s fiery, sometimes combative public persona was gone; in its place was the heavy-lidded look of someone overwhelmed by what she’d just witnessed. “The one thing, in addition to sadness and depression and disappointment, was the whole idea that all of these people were Black and brown,” she said. “I didn’t go talk to anybody from Europe.” She met a family from Toms River, New Jersey—a mother, son, and daughter who’d been living in the U.S. for twelve years when they were arrested by ICE. The daughter, who’d recently turned eighteen, was a senior in high school. A Nigerian man inside was married to a member of the U.S. Navy. Many of the detainees she spoke with had valid work authorizations, but they’d been apprehended anyway, after showing up for seemingly routine appointments at immigration court.

When I asked McIver about her ICE chaperon inside the jail, her usual sharpness returned. He had chided her and the other lawmakers for showing up late. “We’re members of Congress,” she told me. “We’re approving a budget for you to be employed. But you’re talking to us like we work for you.” She sighed. “That was the behavior we got. But, once again, I was expecting that, so I told the man, ‘Have a Merry Christmas.’ ” ♦